WILD CARD. “Pilot.” Lifetime.. 02 August 2003. Joely Fisher (Zoe Busiek), Chris Potter, Rae Dawn Chong, Bronson Picket. Director: Stephen Surjik.  Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   Zoe Busiek is making living as a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas, when she learns that her sister has died in an automobile accident back East, and she decides to quit and head there to take care of her three young children, two girls and a boy. Only the youngest, a girl, takes at all warmly to her sudden abrupt presence in their lives.

   Her new life, in other words, will not be easy. Making matters worse is that the insurance company has determined, on the basis of eye witnesses, that her sister was at fault, and there will be no money coming in from them. Feeling something is wrong, she decides to investigate on her own, and – you will not be surprised to learn – she is right. It takes a lot of perseverance and footwork to get there, but each in its way pays off.

   Not only that, when all is said and done, she is offered a job as an investigator with the insurance company. Or should that last sentence end with an exclamation point?

   I’ve chosen not to. All signs have been pointing to this all episode long. The happy conclusion – and yes, the kids becoming OK with her now as well – comes as all in due course, the way things should be., especially on the Lifetime network. Putting things into a proper perspective, I’d consider the entire production a step up from a similar concept on say, the Hallmark Channel. Not quite as sentimentally cloying, and maybe just a hint more of a solid edge to it, the series lasted for two seasons of eighteen episodes each.

   One additional note: I did not realize until I started writing this review that Joely Fisher is the daughter of Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens. And a half-sister of Carrie Fisher. Talk about family values!

MONTE NASH “The Long Ride.” Syndicated / Four Star Productions. September 17, 1971 (Season One, Episode One). Harry Guardino (Monty Nash). Guest stars: Don Gordon, Lew Gallo. Based on the character and books by Richard Telfair. Director: Nicholas Colasanto. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   Monty Nash is a government agent who, in this short-lived syndicated series (it lasted only 14 episodes), is assigned the task of getting a government witness safely from a jail in South Bend, Indiana, to a courtroom in Chicago. The plan is to use a decoy while Nash and the witness drive by car.

   Things don’t go well. There must have been a leak. Somebody on the inside must be on the take.

   Problem is, as far as any enjoyment there may have been in watching this really really disappointing misfire, is that the Bad Guys are Utterly Inept. Even shooting at Nash’s car from a helicopter, wouldn’t you think that would be enough to get the job done? No, sir. Not this time around. It turns out they turn tail and skedaddle as soon as Nash opens fire on them with only a handgun.

   As an actor, tough and gruff Harry Guardino fits the part the screenwriter and director wanted him to play. The direction is OK. The story, though, collapses under its own triteness into something not worth watching. Luckily the show is only 22 minutes long, streaming as it does without space for commercials.

   And oh yes. The music is too jazzy and too loud. I think they were trying to make believe something interesting was going on.
   

THE ROCKFORD FILES. “The Countess.” NBC. 27 September 1974 (Season 1, Episode 4). James Garner, Gretchen Corbett, Joe Santos, Tom Atkins. Guest stars: Susan Strasberg, Art Lund, Dick Gautier, Harold J. Stone, Gloria Dixon. Teleplay by Stephen J. Cannell, based on a story by Roy Huggins (credited as John Thomas James). Director: Russ Mayberry. Currently streaming on the Roku Channel.

   Rockford is hired by a young woman (Susan Strasberg) who is being blackmailed by a man from her past (Dick Gautier, in a perfect role for him, just oozing oily sleaze) who knows a secret about her earlier life so destructive to her marriage to her second husband she won’t even tell Rockford what it is.

   Of course she does, eventually. And so I assume I can tell you, too. (If I’m wrong, please close your eyes now.) She grew up in a small town in Illinois, and life happened. After skipping bail in Chicago, she ended up in Europe and marrying a count she met there, thus referring to herself as a countess ever since. Now back in the US and happily married again, she wants to stay that way. Blackmailers being who there are, when this fellow is killed, Rockford’s client is high on the list of suspects.

   As well as a couple of syndicate hoodlums whom Rockford soon discovers following his every move. But of course the primary suspect is Rockford himself. He was there on the scene when the fellow was killed, with eyewitnesses, a fact that strains his usually friendly relations with Detective Becker (Joe Santos). Luckily Rockford has a good lawyer at hand, namely Beth Davenport (Gretchen Corbett), who does more lawyer work in this one than she has previously in the series (which largely consisted of wheedling Rockford to work for her pro bono).

   Although I have not reported on any of the earlier episodes, I have been watching the series in order, and this is the first time I can definitively say the people in charge have gotten their acts together. The case is simple but coherent, there are a lot fewer scenes of cars driving endlessly around in this one, and much less padding of the running time with the camera following people along as they’re quietly strolling from one place to another.

   But the big thing I noticed in this one is the comfortable feeling the regular players have reached in interacting with each other. Garner’s natural good-looking charm and his occasional sheepish grin are also in full force in this one.

   Like “Before I Die” (1947), The Golden Spiders (1953) is among Rex Stout’s few works to be adapted for the Nero Wolfe series starring William Conrad and Maury Chaykin, and interestingly, it was selected to kick off both, serving as the premiere episode (1/16/81) of the former on NBC and the two-hour pilot film (3/5/00) for the latter on A&E. The novel finds 12-year-old Pete Drossos offering to cut Wolfe in on a case: wiping windows at the corner of 35th and 9th, he sees the driver of a Caddy, wearing the titular earrings, mouth, “Help, get a cop.” Seen by the passenger apparently jabbing a gun in her ribs, he gets the license number, so Wolfe has Archie report possible illegal activity in connection with it.

   The next day, Purley Stebbins visits to say that Pete was run over on the same corner by a man in the same car, its plate taken from one stolen months ago, and is departing as Mrs. Anthea Drossos arrives. Pete’s last words — spoken to her in the ambulance—were, “Tell Nero Wolfe he got me…. Give him my money in the can,” his savings of $4.30; refusing to return or donate it to the Red Cross, Archie uses it to place an ad asking the woman to make contact with them…since, per “Black Orchids” (1941), “Contact is not a verb under this roof.” She calls to make an appointment while Cramer is there reporting that the car, found parked on 186th Street, had killed Matthew Birch in an alley by a South Street pier.

   Yet the identifying scratch on her cheek, when she offers $500 for Pete’s whereabouts, is recent enough to discredit widow Laura Fromm, who says she was having cocktails at the Churchill with lawyer Dennis Horan when he was killed. Not yet hired, Wolfe agrees to hold her $10,000 retainer and refrain from reporting her visit until the day after, warning her to “beware!” Sure enough, she becomes roadkill, so Archie leaves an account of their conversation for Cramer; in no time, Horan calls, seeking the return of her check, already certified, but Wolfe says he’ll earn it, sending Archie to the Gazette for information, with Lon Cohen revealing that she had dined with Dennis and Claire Horan before her demise.

   The other guests were Angela Wright, the Executive Secretary of Laura’s favorite cause, the Association for the Aid of Displaced Persons (aka Assadip); p.r. expert Paul Kuffner; and magazine publisher Vincent Lipscomb. Hit on the head with a wrench, she was run over by her own Caddy, and had no known connection to I.N.S special agent Birch, so to learn more about her last hours, Wolfe assigns Archie to Laura’s personal secretary, Jean Estey, but he learns little before Kuffner summons her away. When Wolfe asks the ’teers for ideas, Saul suggests posing as a displaced person to seek an Assadip/I.N.S. link, while Orrie tackles the earrings, and Fred tests the hypothesis that Birch was the man Peter saw.

   As they wind it up, Horan and James Albert Maddox, respective counsels for Assadip and Laura, appear unbidden, the latter insisting that as Laura’s executor, he could demand the check from Wolfe, who refuses to reveal what they said, and reports the visit to Cramer. Sent to stir the pot, Archie feigns an offer to spill the beans for $5,000…rejected in quick succession by Jean, Claire, Angela (with Saul slumped in the outer room), and Lipscomb. Back from the offices of Modern Thoughts, he finds Kuffner — clued in by Angela — who tries to accept it, but Wolfe declines; Jean sics the police on Archie, who tells Detective Randall and A.D.A. Mandelbaum, both of Prisoner’s Base (1952), he has broken no law.

   Julius Gerster clams up when Orrie asks about the earrings seen in his shop window, but after Archie — having seen his presumed young son — tells him about Pete, he says Laura bought them. Directed to Horan by Angela and her assistant, Chaney, the undocumented “Leopold Heim” tails the man who tries to extort $10,000 for help; Archie sends Orrie to help as Fred reports learning at bookie Danny Pincus’s bar that Lips Egan has the skinny on Birch. Mort Ervin takes Fred to Lips at Nunn’s Garage, where his cover is blown and they begin torturing him, forcing an eavesdropping Archie to intervene by disarming both thugs, and when the shooting is over, Saul and Orrie appear, having been following Egan.

   Himself tortured (which, while deserved, discomfited me, as it did Steve in his review of the novel), Lips confirms that Birch was in both car and racket, but claims he can identify neither the driver nor the woman who tipped him off to Heim with the password, “Said a spider to a fly.” As Horan appears and is held by Saul, Archie calls for instructions from Wolfe, who has them apologize and suggest that he represent Egan when the pair is taken to the brownstone, where Wolfe brings Cramer up to speed — excepting a notebook listing Egan’s “clients.” In a 180, Horan “reveals” that Laura had fingered Egan, whom he now refuses to represent, and Birch, sending him to Nunn’s to investigate and prevent scandal.

   Tossed to the wolves, Lips returns the compliment; while he is implicating Horan, Wolfe departs punctually for the plant rooms, asking that the trio be removed by an incredulous Cramer, who retaliates by taking Archie, Saul, and Fred as well, but Orrie is on an errand. Hauled before, successively, Deputy Commissioner Neary, boss Skinner, and their fellow mayoral wannabe, D.A. Bowen, Archie is also re-grilled by Mandelbaum regarding Jean, and Cramer interrupts a top-brass confab to say that Horan has been tentatively identified as Pete’s killer. Wolfe summons all and sundry, plus three plainclothes policewomen, to the office to earn his fee, and announces that the murderer was actually a woman in drag.

   Having gotten wind of the blackmailing, and perhaps overheard the password, Laura saw the earrings in the window, gave them to the woman she suspected, and retrieved them to impersonate her, not knowing that she had killed Birch and, fearing he could identify her, Pete. Fetched by Orrie (whose first name, later contradicted in a typical inconsistency, is given here as Orvald), Bernard Levine picks Jean out of Wolfe’s policewoman-enhanced line-up as the woman who bought a man’s felt hat and suit in his Newark clothing store. She claims to have done so on behalf of Claire, whose husband and Lips blow the whistle on Jean; when the dust has settled Wolfe burns the list of the displaced blackmail victims.

   The only episode of Nero Wolfe directed by Michael O’Herlihy, “The Golden Spiders” was adapted by Peter Nasco and David Karp, the latter credited as “Wallace Ware,” as he was on “Murder by the Book” (3/13/81). George Voskovec, playing Fritz opposite Lee Horsley’s Archie, was a scientist in the unsold 1959 Kurt Kasznar/William Shatner Nero Wolfe pilot, “Count the Man Down,” as was John McLiam, later seen in Conrad’s “Death and the Dolls” (4/10/81). Best known as Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady on stage (1956) and screen (1964), Robert Coote played his final role as Theodore, and George Wyner, cast as Saul, had a recurring one as Murray Chase on Horsley’s Matt Houston.

   An Oscar-winner for Tom Jones (1963), series composer John Addison reportedly called his equally whimsical theme for Murder, She Wrote his “old-age pension.” His feature-film credits include Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) — abruptly replacing a score by Bernard Herrmann, which ended their legendary collaboration — and A Bridge Too Far (1977), depicting a battle in which he had participated with the British XXX Corps tank force. Katherine Justice, cast as Angela (now Bell), also appeared with Conrad in three episodes of Cannon; Dennis Horan is now Michael Doran (John Petlock), the p.r. man is Barry Green (James Parkes), and Paul Kessler (Liam Sullivan) is a colleague of Angela’s.

   Wolfe displays amused tolerance as Pete (David Hollander) — foisted upon him by Archie as payback for a childish outburst at Fritz — reports his brief encounter with Jean (Carlene Watkins) and Birch. Now no longer fatal, the hit and run puts him into the I.C.U., yet it’s “touch and go,” per Archie, preserving the poignancy as his mother (Rhoda Gemignani) brings his inflation-adjusted $12.35.

   Posing as Jean, Laura (Penelope Windust) says that “her” plea for help was a misunderstanding and she wants to thank Pete but, learning of the attack, leaves Wolfe with no check, only her promise to return the next day; after a fatal fall from the balcony of her apartment, she is identified by fiancé Doran and Jean.

   When Cramer (Allan Miller) reveals the murder of Birch, who matches Pete’s description of the passenger, his habit of annoying Wolfe by “get[ting] out of a chair [using] just his legs, never his arms or his hands,” is noted, as it is in the novel. Faux-turncoat Archie is rejected by Jean and Angela; in the Assadip garage, his “trusty burglar alarm” (a match placed between hood and body) forewarns him of the car bomb planted by L.A. hit man Joseph Moore, who then attempts to silence Pete — also anticipated by Wolfe — and dies in a struggle with Archie. Saul infiltrates the “vile scheme to smuggle the riffraff of the world into this country — the murderers, the terrorists, the fascists — for exorbitant fees.”

   Saul’s timely rescue from Frank Egan and an unnamed friend in the garage is interrupted by Cramer, who has tailed Archie ever since fruitlessly telling Wolfe to “lay back” due to federal pressure. Convening those concerned, Wolfe turns Angela, Barry, and Paul over to “the men of the 18th [Precinct]” for arranging the entrance of the refugees; fingered as the murderer, who conspired with Birch to blackmail them and killed him after a falling out, Jean claims Laura fell accidentally as they’d argued because “she was going to leave me.” Befitting Wolfe’s somewhat softer side on the series, the episode ends as he returns to the brownstone after leaving a check and orchid for his hospitalized young “partner.”

   Neither the director of The Golden Spiders, Bill Duke, nor scenarist Paul Monash carried over onto the ensuing series, but producer Susan Murdoch and composer Michael Small did, while two of the regulars were recast, as Saul Rubinek switched roles from Saul here (replaced by Conrad Dunn) to Lon Cohen (replacing Gerry Quigley).

   In a parallel acting career, Duke appeared with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando (1985) and Predator (1987); Monash was the respective producer and writer of the Stephen King adaptations Carrie (1976) and Salem’s Lot (1979). Elizabeth Brown (cast as Claire) and Philip Craig (Maddox) each made their only series appearances in “Disguise for Murder” (6/17/01).

   Featured were soon-to-be repertory players Gary Reineke (as Horan), Beau Starr (Lips), Nancy Beatty (Mrs. Drossos), Nicky Guadagni (Angela), Hrant Alianak (Gerstner [sic]), Peter Mensah (Mort), and Robert Bockstael (Kuffner). As Archie (Timothy Hutton) sits at his typewriter in an opening montage of the brownstone, with expository narration, we see the portrait of Sherlock Holmes hanging above his desk, mentioned as far back as The Rubber Band (1936). The sage vs. saffron and tarragon kerfuffle, almost verbatim, deftly introduces Fritz (Colin Fox); the day after Pete (Robert Clark) reports on Birch (Dwayne McLean) and Jean (Larissa Laskin), Purley (R.D. Reid) brings news of his brutal murder.

   The ad in the Mirror (replacing the Gazette as Lon’s employer) elicits the visit by Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), revealing the Birch/Drossos link, with Laura (Mimi Kuzyk) hard on his heels; the scratch is omitted, as is Lipscomb, and Wolfe intuits her imposture. Dressed as a mortician, getting him in to Jean, Archie returns as Wolfe tells Orrie (Trent McMullen), Fred (Fulvio Cecere), and Saul, “I resent the assumption that those who come to seek my help may be murdered with impunity.” Saul’s encounters with Angela at the Association of European Refugees (AER), Horan, and Lips are depicted, rather than merely related in the book, while young Irving (Brian Miranda) is explicitly identified as the jeweler’s son.

   The top brass confronting Archie is consolidated in the person of Neary, now “promoted” to Commissioner and given a first name, Walter (James Purcell). Wolfe’s final gathering, where he observes, “This is the first time I’ve undertaken to single out a murderer from a group of mostly strangers” before producing surprise witness Levine (Jack Newman, later seen in “Poison à la Carte” [5/26/02]), is true to Stout, as Chaykin invests his retelling of the crimes with dramatic tension. Monash replaces the burning of Egan’s notebook with an effective coda in which, because Wolfe and Pete were “partners” on the case, Anthea is presented with half of Laura’s fee by Archie, given Wolfe’s aversion to crying women.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Three Witnesses

Edition cited —

      The Golden Spiders: Bantam (1955)

Online sources —

   In Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel Prisoner’s Base (1952), Archie Goodwin describes his employer as weighing “four thousand ounces” (a possible post-Zeck low of 250 pounds); they reach an impasse over a young woman who refuses to identify herself and offers $50 a day to hide out in the brownstone until June 30.

   This is broken by the arrival of lawyer Perry Helmar, who offers Wolfe $5,000 to find Priscilla Eads, of whom he is the guardian and trustee of her father’s estate, and $10,000 if he produces her by…you guessed it, June 30, when she takes possession on her 25th birthday. One complication is doubt within “a large and successful corporation” about Pris’s inheriting 90% of the stock to take control.

   Another is ex-husband Eric Hagh, who has a document she’d signed granting him half of the property, and Helmar thinks she might be going to Venezuela to see him, so Wolfe — tipped that Archie recognized her photo — says he’ll sleep on it.

   Pris can either match his offer or leave so that Wolfe can accept, giving her a head start; she opts for the latter, and when she is murdered, Cramer comes calling, because Archie’s prints are on her luggage. After Wolfe directs him to “unload,” Cramer reveals that her maid, Margart Fomos, was strangled near her tenement, as was Pris in her apartment, but Wolfe refuses to take it on, absent a paying client and notwithstanding his self-esteem, so Archie undertakes to do so.

   Lon Cohen of the Gazette explains that the stock will now be divided among personnel of the Softdown, Inc. towel and textile business (plus Helmar), where Archie, mistaken for a cop, finds them in conference with stylist Daphne O’Neil. President Jay Luther Brucker; Viola Duday, the former assistant to Nathan Eads; VP/sales manager Bernard Quest; and secretary/treasurer Oliver Pitkin all benefit from the murder, and while Daphne was hired in the decade since Nate’s death, Vi says Pris planned to oust her. As Archie grills them on their alibis, Lt. Rowcliff arrests him for impersonating a cop and takes him downtown, where Skinner has apparently become Commisioner, and replaced as D.A. by Ed Bowen.

   Himself hauled in by the despised Rowcliff as a material witness, Wolfe says he now has a client — Archie — because of his “humane, romantic, and thoroughly admirable [quest], and your callous and churlish treatment of him…”

   Over dinner, Lon says the remaining 10% is owned by Sarah Jaffee, a Korean War widow and friend of Pris whose father had been a Softdown associate; male journalists favor Ollie as a suspect, and females Vi, with at least half certain that Daphne is involved. Sarah tells Archie she declined to help Pris elect a female board of directors, including them and Margaret with Vi as president, and she also refuses to seek an injunction restraining the fivesome from assuming ownership.

   Archie has no better luck with the bereaved Andreas Fomos, but then Attorney Albert M. Irby arrives, representing Hagh and seeking affidavits that Pris had acknowledged signing the document, which Helmar contests.

   Offered 5% of any settlement, Wolfe refuses until he meets Eric, en route from Caracas, which he suggests take place at “a meeting of those concerned.” Grateful to Archie for helping her get past her husband’s death, Sarah does a 180, so Nathaniel Parker takes a $1 retainer until a court is satisfied that the stock was not acquired via murder; this compels an outraged Helmar to convene the suspects at Wolfe’s office, where it is stipulated in advance that Hagh and Irby should be seen, but not heard.

   Deciding that Pris must have owed Margaret something big, which he wants, Andy also reconsiders and joins the party; there, Vi identifies Miss Drescher, a superintendent at the factory, as the last proposed director, and Bernie claims that he and Sarah’s father, Arthur Gilliam, were responsible for Softdown’s success.

   They disperse without resolution, but an alarm bell rings in Archie’s head when Sarah calls after dancing at the Flamingo Club with Parker to report her keys missing, and he hastens over, arriving too late. Even more guilt-ridden than before, he puts himself at Cramer’s disposal, since the keys were stolen at the meeting, sitting in on interrogations and even buying Purley fried clams at Louie’s.

   On a brownstone pit stop in between visits to Leonard Street, Archie is surprised to learn that Wolfe has hired Saul, and finally, “flumped,” Skinner suggests replaying the meeting to spot the key-thief and/or deduce a motive, with Saul standing in for Sarah.

   Wolfe flips the script, noting that Margaret was not killed only to obtain the keys to Pris’s apartment, and Sarah, having seen his photo, knew “Hagh” was an impostor and had somehow made him aware of it in the office. In South America, Saul identified him as Siegfried Muecke; having impersonated Hagh — killed in a snow slide — and unaware of the provisions of the will regarding the stock, Muecke strangled each of them because they could expose him…

   A two-part first-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, the only entry directed by Neill Fearnley, “Prisoner’s Base” (5/13 & 20/01) was adapted by Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin, who shared an Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination for Part 2, and were second only to Sharon Elizabeth Doyle as scenarists.

   It marked Hrant Alianak’s sole appearance as Parker (embodied twice by fellow repertory player George Plimpton in Season 2), and Bill MacDonald’s first in his recurring role of Rowcliff. The closing credits list alternate spellings for several character names (Jaffe, Eades, O’Neill), and Aron Tager, previously seen as Commissioner Bernard Fromm, is amusingly credited as “Commissioner Skinn.”

   The show customarily capitalizes on the comedic potential as Archie (Timothy Hutton), stung by sarcasm regarding a low bank account, retaliates by tearing up his salary check, annoying Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) by disrupting the accounting but sweetening the offer made by Pris (Shauna Black).

   Ron Rifkin, later of “Over My Dead Body” (7/8 & 15/01), guests as Helmar, with the usual suspects — literally — as the Softdown contingent: Bernie (James Tolkan), Vi (Nicky Guadagni), Daphne (Dina Barrington), Ollie (Gary Reineke), and Brucker (David Schurmann). Although appreciative that Archie was so forthcoming about Pris’s visit, Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) can’t resist gloating over their lack of a client.

   This is surpassed by Rowcliff’s glee when arresting Archie, whose insistence that he had only identified himself as “Goodwin. Detective,” and flashed his license, “which no one took the trouble to examine,” triggers his foe’s tell-tale stutter.

   The colloquy with Bowen (Robert Bockstael) — whose door bears the first initial “T.” —  is delicious as Wolfe names his client, excoriates the squirming Rowcliff, and enumerates his hatred of leaving home, being touched, or riding in any kind of vehicle. The dismay of Fritz (Colin Fox), told he must unexpectedly stretch dinner to include Lon (Saul Rubinek), and the badinage over who is in whose debt, as they haggle over the terms of the quid pro quo, are equally droll.

   A self-described “nut,” Sarah (Kari Matchett) never put away her late husband’s hat and coat when he went to war, and couldn’t bring herself to do so once he was reported dead, also keeping a place set for him at the table, so Archie occupies it, and touchingly agrees to take his things to the Salvation Army. Fomos is eliminated, but Part 2 brings onstage Irby (Wayne Best), noting that Eric (Steve Cumyn) rejected a $100,000 settlement, and Parker, with Wolfe listening in as Helmar calls him a “murderer” for sending Pris to her doom. Fearnley generates suspense in Sarah’s darkened apartment, where Archie finds she has lost the titular game, with the phone one base and the elevator outside the other.

   A montage depicts Archie’s efforts as — per Stout — “an informal adjunct of the NYPD,” initially arrested again after he is seen forcing the night man (Jody Racicot) to admit him at gunpoint. At Skinner’s behest, the suspects are gathered for the playback, pre-empted by Wolfe’s “remarks” fingering Muecke, with Saul (Conrad Dunn) confirming that while signing the paper had been Pris’s idea, Hagh himself “was too proud a man to sponge off a woman…”

   Goldberg and Rabkin amend Stout’s ending as Archie’s punch forestalls an attack by Muecke on Wolfe, rather than by Andy on Muecke; they close with him poised to tear up his payment for Wolfe’s services, not Wolfe doing so himself, as in the novel.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: The Golden Spiders

Edition cited: Prisoner’s Base: Bantam (1963)

    The final chapter, omitted from most Bantam editions, is thoughtfully provided by the Wolfe Pack, “the official Nero Wolfe literary society,” here.

Online sources:

   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:

BARNABY JONES “To Catch a Dead Man.” CBS. 04 February 1973. (Season One, Episode Two.) Buddy Ebsen , Lee Meriwether. Guest cast: Janice Rule, Darleen Carr, Victoria Shaw, William Shatner. A Quinn Martin Production. Directed by William Hale. Currently streaming on Amazon and (for free), on YouTube. [See below.]

   It’s almost a given that everyone of a certain age reading this will know the basic premise of this vintage almost geriatric PI series from the mid-1970s. (Buddy Ebsen was 65 when the show started, and it lasted for most of eight years.) In the first episode (this is the second) Barnaby Jones care out of retirement as a PI to find the man who murdered his son Hal. Teaming up with him is another private eye, a man by the name of Frank Cannon, also of some TV fame, who was a friend of his son.

   By the end of the episode Barnaby has decided to go back into the PI business again, assisted by his son’s widow, Betty (Lee Meriwether), as his devoted secretary.

   In “To Catch a Dead Man” Barnaby is hired by a young girl whose boy friend has disappeared. I don’t consider it giving away anything to tell you that the boy friend is dead, killed in a boat explosion caused by a millionaire (William Shatner) who would like the world to believe the man in the boat was him. In the meantime, he has hunkered down in a fishing resort area with his current girl friend.

   What follows is, well, we the viewers following along with Barnaby as he painstakingly puts the clues together to solve the case, with a continual twinkle in his eye and a knowing grin. I only watched the show on and off over the years when it was on, but until someone can tell me otherwise, I assume that this was the pattern for all of Barnaby’s investigations from this point on.

   As enjoyable as this episode is, and in all honesty, based only on this episode, it seems unlikely that Buddy Ebsen’s folksy charm as an actor would be able to carry the series for as long as it did, but on the other hand, it certainly seems to have done.

   Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel Murder by the Book (1951) marks Archie’s first reference that I’ve noted — insert fallibility disclaimer—to his weighing a “seventh of a ton” (285.7 pounds). I’ll continue to monitor the situation, but I think this became the standard after, e.g., “two hundred and sixty-some pounds” (“Help Wanted, Male,” 1945), a quarter of a ton (i.e., 500 pounds, perhaps figurative; “Instead of Evidence,” 1946), close to 340 (Too Many Women, 1947), and an even 300 (“Door to Death,” 1949). With its metafictional publishing theme, it is set in motion when Wolfe is hired by the father of Joan Wellman, an editor at Scholl and Hanna who died in an apparent hit and run in Van Cortlandt Park.

   Peoria grocer John R. Wellman believes otherwise, due to her appointment that day with Baird Archer to discuss a novel she’d rejected; no trace is found, but Wolfe recalls seeing the name on a list of tentative aliases among the effects of Leonard Dykes, whose murder led Cramer to consult him six weeks earlier. He had been a law clerk at Corrigan, Phelps, Kustin and Briggs, formerly O’Malley, Corrigan and Phelps until O’Malley’s disbarment. Conjecturing that Joan was killed because she’d read the manuscript, Wolfe has the ’teers canvass typing services and sends Archie to Scholl and Hanna, where he merely confirms that she’d read, rejected, and returned Put Not Your Trust to Archer via General Delivery.

   Joining the hunt, Archie arrives at the office of typist Rachel Abrams just after her plunge from the window, pocketing the notebook recording Archer’s payment on his way out the door; reaching Rachel’s mother before the news, he gets the names of her friends William Butterfield, Hulda Greenberg, and Cynthia Free, on whom he sics the ’teers. Shifting his focus, Wolfe has Archie cultivate the law firm’s female staff of 16, with ten accepting his invitation to dinner when he sends them orchids. Archie produces Mr. Wellman and Mrs. Abrams to stir sentiment, eliciting steno Helen Troy’s controversial assertion that Conroy O’Malley killed Dykes for getting him disbarred because he bribed the foreman of a jury.

   She notes that others believe her uncle, new partner Frederick Briggs, ratted Con out, and killed Dykes to prevent his revealing that fact; Eleanor Gruber, secretary to Con and now Louis Kustin, posits that his death was unrelated to the others, and as the party breaks up, Archie takes Sue Dondero, Emmett Phelps’s secretary, dancing. Senior partner James A. Corrigan brings his current and former colleagues to Wolfe’s office, where they submit to fruitless questioning, and he requests samples of Dykes’s writing. On a resignation letter, offered due to gossip (but declined), is a scribbled notation directing them to Psalm 146, verse 3: “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”

   Switchboard operator Blanche Duke identifies the handwriting (via a ruse by Archie) as Corrigan’s, and says that writing a book was one way she’d suggested the smitten Dykes might attract Sue’s attention. Regarding the notation as a trick, Wolfe sends Archie out to California to have Dykes’s sister and heir, Peggy Potter, search his letters to confirm that he wrote the novel, and solicit the firm’s advice about having literary agent “Walter Finch” sell the film rights on her behalf, hoping to panic the killer. Archie hires Nathan Harris from Ferdinand Dolman’s Southwest Agency to pose as Finch, and another man to hide within earshot when Peggy meets with Corrigan, who immediately flies out to L.A.

   Archie himself hides in Finch’s closet when she sends Corrigan to the South Seas Hotel, where he tries to insist on a look at the (nonexistent) manuscript, saying he has reason to believe it is libelous, and leaves after an altercation. Stymied again chez Potter by Finch, then left on guard, Corrigan infiltrates his room, only to find Archie, who puts Southwest man Phil Buratti on his tail; when he calls from the airport, Archie asks Phil to get him a seat on Corrigan’s flight back east. The fivesome revisits Wolfe, demanding to know the contents of the manuscript or offering to buy it, but Wolfe merely says he is not yet ready to act, while Kustin correctly thinks that “it’s a ten-cent bluff,” and he has no knowledge.

   That night they get a call, ostensibly from Corrigan, who says he has sent Wolfe a letter, followed by an apparent gunshot; after they alert the police, Archie gets there in time to witness the discovery of his body, consistent with suicide. The unsigned letter confesses to blowing the whistle anonymously on Con without identifying the information’s source, and to stumbling on the “Modern Novel of a Lawyer’s Frailty,” which made it clear that Dykes knew he had done so. Claiming to have destroyed all copies of the roman à clef, he admits killing Dykes after a blackmail attempt and the others to cover his tracks, but while the details are obviously accurate, Wolfe believes that the killer framed Corrigan.

   The D.A. is satisfied that it was suicide, yet after an undisclosed report from Saul, Wolfe has Cramer and Purley Stebbins assemble the ten women and four surviving partners for a “risky but resolute effort to expose a murderer,” to which Archie invites Wellman. Wolfe deduced the truth because the “confession” asserted that Corrigan knew the manuscript’s contents, when his behavior in L.A. clearly indicated that he did not. He had informed on O’Malley, who targeted him for murder to avenge that fact and “killed three people so he could safely kill a fourth,” and made the notation in Corrigan’s handwriting — assumed by Cramer et alia to have been a trick by Wolfe or Archie — as the first step in framing him.

   An episode of NBC’s Nero Wolfe series starring William Conrad, “Murder by the Book” (3/13/81) was directed by Bob Kelljan, best known for Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and its 1971 sequel, and written by David Karp, an Emmy-winner for a two-part 1964 episode of The Defenders, using his “Wallace Ware” byline. Jean Wellman (Delta Burke) refuses to believe that her sister Claire — a reader for Wainwright Press — committed suicide with alcohol and sleeping pills, which she did not use, and the hunt is on for the elusive Blake Ritchie. Karp also renames the lawyers Phillip Corrigan (David Hedison), Robert Phelps (Edmund Gilbert), George Briggs (Walter Brooke), and Ryan O’Malley (John Randolph).

   The episode opens as Cramer (Allan Miller) reports that an unknown man killed in a hit-and-run a block from the brownstone bore a slip of paper with Wolfe’s name and address and the mysterious list, which includes “Ritchie”; by the time this ties him in to Claire, he has been identified as Leonard Dart, a member of the firm. When Jean takes Archie (Lee Horsley) to her apartment to retrieve a contact number that may have been Ritchie’s, his instincts save her from a booby-trapped door with minor injury, so Saul (George Wyner) guards her at the hospital. Wolfe suspects that she was targeted because, per Archie, “she knows something she doesn’t know she knows,” a sentiment worthy of Donald Rumsfeld.

   The editor who turned down the first novel supplies the title, and Jean recalls being told it was about the members of a law firm. At O’Malley, Phelps, Corrigan and Briggs, Archie tells Dart’s secretary, Elizabeth Marsh (Jennifer Leak), that he was murdered, which Miss Johnson (Elizabeth Halliday) quickly reports to Briggs — who gives him the bum’s rush — and Phelps, yet retiree O’Malley wants to protect the reputation of the firm he made, and Wolfe finally gets a well-heeled client. For safety, Jean is moved to the brownstone, and a visit by Corrigan leads Wolfe to invite the three active partners to dinner, before which Liz, whose information suggested that Ritchie and Dart were the same man, is strangled.

   Wolfe learns of a prior scandal, the embezzlement of $2 million — unproven and repaid — from an estate the firm represented, which he theorizes may have been the subject of Put Not Your Trust. Liz was found in the computer room, suggesting that Dart kept the book there; it is unlocked with the code “146 P 3,” and the list of names were for characters, to protect him from libel. Wolfe had suspected since being hired by him that the embezzler and killer was O’Malley, who asks before Cramer takes him away to make a summation: his theft, which they concealed, gave his partners “the shock of righteous men, meaning those who haven’t been caught yet with their hands in the till…[and so] they retired me.”

   Kelljan was blessed with a strong guest cast, including Burke, known for the CBS sitcom Designing Women, and Randolph, one of the former blacklistees — along with Will Geer, Jeff Corey, and Nedrick Young — cast by John Frankenheimer in Seconds (1966). David Hedison, who starred in The Fly (1958) and Irwin Allen’s series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, became the first actor to play James Bond’s CIA buddy, Felix Leiter, in multiple movies, Live and Let Die (1973) and Licence to Kill (1989). Giving ammunition to those who disapprove of Conrad’s casting, the episode ends with the jaw-dropping sight of the grinning Wolfe returning Archie’s thumbs-up, which Stout fortunately did not live to see.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “The Cop-Killer”

Edition cited:

      Murder by the Book: Bantam (1954)

Online source:

THE OUTSIDER “Periwinkle Blue.” NBC, 02 April 1969 (Season One, Episode 24). Darren McGavin (PI David Ross). Guest cast: Lois Nettleton, Ellen Corby, Douglas Dick, Bill Quinn, Richard Benedict. Series created by Roy Huggins (as John Thomas James). Teleplay by Edward J. Lakso, based on a story by Gene Levitt. Directed by Richard Benedict. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   For beginners, if you’ve never read Michael Shonk’s overview of the series, or you haven’t in a while, let me steer you there first before you read on back here.

   This, however, is an excerpt from his first two paragraphs:

   The shooting death of Bobby Kennedy is what had happened between the showing of the pilot episode, which Michael reviewed here, and the TV networks were under fire for showing too much violence in their offerings, and The Outsider, once picked up as a series, took the brunt of it.

   Here’s Michael’s opening statement on the pilot film:

   
   In reviewing the series, Michael went into detail about the episodes that were available to him at the time, but “Periwinkle Blue.” was not one of them. Filling in the gap, Mike Doran left a comment talking about it as an episode he still remembered, but no more than that.

   At the beginning of this episode Ross turns down a client who thinks his wife is trying to kill him, thinking that the man was exaggerating several incidents that had recently occurred. Later on, discovering from a newspaper that the man had been killed in a hit-and-run accident, he decides to take the death as a sign that perhaps he was wrong.

   Attending the man’s funeral, he meets the wife (the wholly delightful Lois Nettleton), as obvious a suspect in a case of murder as there could ever be, but yet, over the next few weeks, he is not quite sure. He is attracted to her and her flirty but quietly quirky ways, but there is no way he can dispel the suspicions he has of her. He is puzzled and perplexed, in a role that only a completely bewildered Darren McGavin could play.

   This is, as you can plainly see, not your usual TV PI drama, and to tell you the truth, I think this episode, at least, is all the better for it. If I’ve intrigued you at all, do watch this one.
   

   Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe collection Curtains for Three (1951) contains the now-standard three novellas published in The American Magazine: “The Gun with Wings” (December 1949), “Bullet for One” (July 1948), and “Disguise for Murder” (as “The Twisted Scarf,” September 1950).

   â€œThe Gun with Wings” was not near the body of opera singer Alberto Mion — or so say his wife, Peggy, and would-be successor, Fred Weppler, who didn’t tell the police it only appeared later beside the supposed suicide. They want Wolfe to dispel the shadow of murder over their intended union; Archie has “occasionally let Lily Rowan share her pair of opera seats with me” so he recognizes a suspect, baritone Gifford James.

   Continuing the ballistics theme, the “Bullet for One” knocks industrial designer Sigmund Keyes out of his saddle in Central Park; five of the suspects collectively hire Wolfe, some of them hoping he’ll nail the sixth, yet before long, all but one of the sextet is arrested for one reason or another.

   In “Disguise for Murder,” the brownstone hosts “no such throng as that within [Archie’s] memory”: at the suggestion of Bill McNab, garden editor of the Gazette, Wolfe has invited the Manhattan Flower Club to see his orchids. Fritz and Saul are manning the door while Archie — who regrets having agreed to help mingle — is taking a breather in the office, where he is joined by a panicked young woman, Cynthia Brown.

   Con artists Cynthia and her “brother,” Col. Percy Brown, were brought by Mimi Orwin, their prospective mark, a wealthy widow hooked in Florida and accompanied by her son, Eugene. Cynthia was terrified when upstairs she recognized, and was recognized by, the unidentified man she’d seen entering Doris Hatten’s apartment, whom she believed was “keeping” her friend there — and strangled her with her own scarf immediately afterward, a crime that has baffled Cramer for five months.

   Promising to bring Wolfe down to hear her out, Archie returns to the plant rooms to keep a special eye on the men, including one who grabs a flower pot in an oddly menacing way, revealed as an actor, Malcolm Vedder.

   The crowd has thinned to a trickle when the wife of Homer N. Carlisle, executive VP of the North American Foods Co., peeks into the office for a look at Wolfe’s famous three-foot-wide globe and finds Cynthia, strangled with, per Doc Vollmer, something like…a scarf.

   Cramer grills the remaining visitors, held there by Fritz and Saul, but both he and Wolfe decline psychiatrist Nicholson Morley’s offer to question all men among the 219 guests, dutifully recorded by Saul, and try to identify the killer. In a spiteful, ill-advised move, Cramer insists on sealing the office as a crime scene; otherwise “Wolfe might have called his attention to a certain fact as soon as [he] saw it himself,” saving a lot of trouble.

   Gleaned from Archie’s report but overlooked by him and Cramer, that fact leads Wolfe to a dangerous test of his theory: he sends a blackmail note to one suspect, who calls with an unfamiliar voice to make an appointment with Archie via an elaborate runaround and two cut-outs. Tied to a chair by those he dubs W-J (wrestler-jockey, for his mismatched torso and legs) and Skinny, he is at the mercy of the killer, at first unrecognizable.

   But bribery turns the flunkies, and “he” is revealed as the cross-dressing wife of Doris’s sugar daddy, Carlisle; in the plant rooms, the men had all doffed their hats, yet Cynthia recognized the killer specifically because of the hat, assuming it to be a man, as she had at the apartment.

   A first-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Disguise for Murder” (6/17/01) was one of four collaborations between director John L’Ecuyer and writer Sharon Elizabeth Doyle. As with the following consecutive pair, “Door to Death” (6/4/01) and “Christmas Party” (7/1/01), this and “Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe” (6/3/01), while based on widely spaced novellas, were linked by Doyle with original material for international broadcast and DVD as the respective faux telefilms Wolfe Goes Out and Wolfe Stays In. Here, her connective tissue is the often-invoked Thursday-night poker game played by Lon (Saul Rubinek), Orrie (Trent McMullen), Saul (Conrad Dunn), and Archie (Timothy Hutton).

   When Archie relates a postscript to “Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe,” Fritz (Colin Fox) asks them to quit early to prepare for the onslaught, during which Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) and Archie struggle to keep smiling. The body of Doris (Tramara Burford) is seen briefly in flashback, and after Archie encounters Percy (Nicholas Campbell), Mimi (Nancy Beatty), Eugene (Phillip [sic] Craig), and Vedder (Beau Starr), that of Cynthia (Kathryn Zenna) is found by Mrs. Carlisle (Debra Monk). Repertory player Ken Kramer makes a second and final appearance as Vollmer — later played by Joe Flaherty in “The Silent Speaker” (7/14 & 21/02) — summoned as Homer (Aron Tager) blusters at the indignity of being detained.

   As usual, the regulars are superb, e.g, Fritz bringing down Percy as he attempts to leave; Wolfe bellowing, “The police shall receive no sandwiches!”; Saul coolly standing by his legendary memory; Cramer’s (Bill Smitrovich) glee as he has Lt. Rowcliff (an uncredited Bill MacDonald) seal Wolfe’s office.

   The interrogations are intercut into a montage à la “Over My Dead Body” (7/8 & 15/01). A burgundy jacket and long hair visualize the odd persona of Morley (Richard Waugh), while the need for viewers to see and hear what had been simply described on the page causes the phone call to telegraph the killer’s gender a little more clearly before Skinny (Boyd Banks) and W.J. (James Tolkan) confront Archie.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Murder by the Book

Edition cited —

      Curtains for Three: Bantam (1970)

Online source —