H. C. McNEILE [SAPPER] – The Black Gang.

Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1922, as by “Sapper.” Doubleday Doran & Co., US, hardcover, 1922. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft. Filmed as The Return of Bulldog Drummond: BIP, 1934, screenwriter/director: Walter Summers.

   Readers should be warned that I am going to write a positive review of one of the most excoriated books in the thriller genre, and I should know since I have been among those excoriating it. That said, I think someone needs to point out why Sapper (Herman Cyril McNeile) and Bulldog Drummond have lingered so long in the public imagination and are still read today by some — myself included.

   The reasons aren’t just historical nor the relative low state of the public taste, and there are reasons Drummond inspired writers like Ian Fleming and Clive Cussler, not to mention Lester Dent and Doc Savage, Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer, Leslie Charteris and the Saint, and John Creasey and Patrick Dawlish.

   There is more going on here than just a brief popular phenomena. Today the name still has a certain evocation, a fact expressed by it’s use by a well known design firm and it’s presence in the rock lyrics of the band the Coasters in their 1957 song “Searchin!”

   Sapper was one of the writers critic and journalist Richard Usborne defined as “The Clubland Heroes,” in his book of that name, a study of Dornford Yates, Sapper, and John Buchan’s novels about West End club men heroes of a particular brand of thriller (or shocker as Buchan preferred) that was popular in the period between WWI and WWII. (Buchan, it should be noted, began as early as 1910).

   Sapper began his career writing in the Kipling mode (which he never fully escaped) in short stories set in the trenches of WWI France. His popular collections of short fiction exemplified the British soldier and particularly the upper middle class Englishman, a sportsman who for some tragic reason might be an ordinary ranker or perhaps an officer, and become involved in some dramatic wartime incident (and following Kipling’s lead from the Soldier’s Three stories, a fair number of comic ones). At the site devoted to the artwork on the dust jackets of books about the Great War (I) an entire page is devoted to Sapper.

   At the war’s end McNeile returned to England, and like many men in his position he was dissatisfied and found it difficult to readjust. He probably didn’t feel the general malaise and depression many veterans did, he just wasn’t the type, but it was a result of his war experience and disillusion with civilian life that he wrote his 1920 novel Bulldog Drummond: the Story of a Demobilized Officer Who Found Peacetime Dull.

   Captain Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond is a large cheerfully ugly type (with beautiful eyes and a charming smile) who indeed finds peacetime dull, so from his flat in Half Moon Street in London’s fashionable West End he takes out an ad advertising his services.

   The ad brings one Phyllis Benton (of the golden brown curls), a lady in distress whose father is being held by mysterious men. And we’re off. Soon Drummond is joined by his friends Peter Darrell (second in command), Algy Longworth (silly ass), Ted Jerringham (�a good amateur actor”) and Toby Sinclair (V.C. no less).

   As Usborne points out it is the world of the public school scrum with beer and martinis. (Sapper had obviously read his Baroness Orczy, for the lads sound an awful lot like the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel and much of Drummond’s drawling and babbling is drawn from the Pimpernel himself, Sir Percy Blakeney.) An entire generation of young Englishmen had died in the trenches of the Great War, and in the adventures of Drummond and his friends they were reborn in the popular imagination.

   But as in the public school scrum there is the ‘enemy’, and here Sapper outdoes himself, for in his first four adventures Drummond is opposed by one of the great villains in popular literature, a figure of cunning and cold intellect who could give Moriarity and Fu Manchu a run for their money and was the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond’s ultimate rival Ernst Stavro Blofield of Spectre, namely Carl Peterson.

   Indeed Peterson is such a good villain Usborne gives him his own chapter in The Clubland Heroes, the only villain to earn such an honor, or deserve it.

   And if Peterson isn’t enough Sapper outdoes himself by giving him an adoring and worshipful black widow of a mistress, Irma Peterson, the slinkiest deadliest and most evil companion in the literature. If Peterson didn’t consistently overestimate Drummond’s intelligence and always fail to plan for the most obvious action it is pretty clear our hero would never have had a chance. He’s outmatched by a mile.

   There’s a plot in progress to bring ruin not just to Phyllis’s father, but the entire British economic system. Before it’s over Drummond will have strangled a full grown ape in a pitched battle in the dark, played commando assaulting Peterson’s stronghold, and tossed Peterson’s second in command Henry Lakington into a much deserved acid bath. (�The retribution is just.”)

   England is saved, Peterson and Irma escape, and Drummond marries Phyllis, who has already begun her notable career of being the most kidnapped wife in literature. (The Spider’s companion Nita Van Sloan may have outdone Phyllis, but then she wasn’t a wife.)

   Sapper may not have been subtle, but he had a fine eye for melodrama. Bulldog Drummond was an immediate success and there was little doubt he would be back, although between the first and second books Sapper produced a series of connected stories about another hero, monocled Jim Maitland.

   Jim Maitland (1921) is probably Sapper’s best book and best character, but in this article slash review we are involved with Drummond, and his second adventure, The Black Gang, the latter referring to Drummond’s black-hooded and black leather clad team of self-styled vigilantes who have been terrorizing the criminal element in England in the period before the novel begins.

   The focus of the book is another plot against England that’s afoot at Carl Peterson’s hands. (He’s now disguised as “a splendid example of the right sort of clergyman, tall, broad shouldered, with a pair of shrewd, kindly eyes.”)

   This time Carl is behind a phony peace movement and in league with actual Bolsheviks, including the murderous Yulowski who has brought to England with him the very rifle with which he clubbed the Romanov royals to death. (Before it’s over Drummond and Phyllis will only just escape the same fate with the royally blooded rifle.) Nothing less than a Communist Revolution in England is at hand.

   Meanwhile Sir Bryan Johnstone, the Yard’s Director of Criminal Investigation and Chief Inspector MacIver are getting nowhere with a mysterious group of ruffians in black leather and hoods who have been making hay with London’s less social class of criminals.

   White slavers, pimps (though implied, never mentioned obviously), usurers, and the like have been disappearing, and when they do show up again keeping silence after some decidedly rough treatment that has shown them the error of their ways, while the Reds are up to something.

   In the meantime, if things aren’t bad enough for Hugh Drummond, the boy who had been Johnstone’s fag at school (and no, it doesn’t have the same meaning in England) shows up on his door burbling nonsense.

   Before it’s over Drummond will just miss being blown up by a grenade (the fellow beside him gets blown to gory bits — it hardly puts Drummond off his beer or his feed though), and just misses being poisoned by a Borgia poison in a doyley at the Ritz, not to mention that Russian rifle butt that once graced royal skulls. Drummond and Phyllis are captured, Carl takes the time to gloat:

   Of course Drummond does escape, foils Peterson’s plot, and rescues Phyllis, he even convinces Scotland Yard that the Black Gang has played an important role in the deadly doings. He also spares Peterson’s life at Phyllis insistence:

   To be fair, Phyllis is less concerned about Peterson than the inhuman rage her husband is in, having moments before pinned the murderous Yulowski to the wall with his own bayonet like a giant butterfly on cardboard. Carl won’t be quite so lucky two books later in The Final Count, when he meets his end at Drummond’s hands in an airship (the Megalithic) over London.

   Richard Usborne thinks Sapper blows this moment, which he humorously attributes to the narrator of the story, but I agree with Kingsley Amis in his book on James Bond, The James Bond Dossier. It is Sapper at his most powerful.

   The plot is averted, and the Black Gang retired, but they wait, they wait. Irma comes back in the fifth book, The Female of the Species, for revenge (Phyllis gets kidnapped again, and kills her first man with a spanner) and then off and on for the rest of the series, well into the ones written by Sapper’s successor Gerard Fairlie (who was a better writer overall, and the actual model for Drummond as well as an actual secret agent who operated behind enemy lines in WWII). The latter even brought the Black Gang back in the last Drummond novel, The Return of the Black Gang (1952), but in a much more politically correct fashion.

   Now, what was so objectionable? Well, in The Black Gang maybe it’s the constant harping on the clique of murderous Russian Jews who killed the Tsar, or the flashy types who are in the white slavery business, or maybe it’s the little island the Black Gang have set up where an ex-sergeant major and some demobilized officers have set up a concentration camp for these low types — Jews and foreigners and other less attractive sorts — where they have been taught the error of their ways with a bullwhip and the boot.

   Fortunately this happens offstage, but it is difficult for a modern reader to read this passage without visions of jackboots and SS uniforms. But the fault is history’s and not Sapper’s. If we apply the same standards, Mickey Spillane only fares a little better.

   And look at it this way. In England where there was the outlet of popular literature this only happened in a book, and only to actual criminals, not ordinary people, and no women or children or innocents. In Germany where there was no real tradition of this kind of thriller literature to speak of; it happened in the streets and people looked away or pretended it wasn’t happening.

   Some, there, and here, still pretend it didn’t happen today, but while the attitudes of the Drummond books and others may not be enlightened, it isn’t fair to brand them as would-be storm troopers either.

   By the standards of the day Sapper is only a minor offender. It takes Sydney Horler or M.P. Shiel to really be offensive. Sapper was at worst only aping popular sentiments and opinions that, however despicable, need to be viewed in historical perspective. This is not an apologia for him or others, only a perspective.

   If you can’t overlook or understand the limits of older popular fiction then you probably would do best to avoid it.

   By its very nature popular fiction reflects popular views, and luckily as time passes we progress, slowly, in our recognition of our prejudices and failures. Popular fiction is at worst a bellwether, not a clarion call to action.

   No apology, it’s nasty stuff, but it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. The Black Gang was written in 1922, long before the horrors of the Holocaust and at a time when ‘concentration camp’ only referred to the prisons where Boers had been held in the Boer War.

   The casual Anti-Semitism of the book was fairly standard in popular fiction of the day. (It even shows up a little in Buchan, who was not the least anti-Semitic and indeed an early voice to warn of Fascism.) This is before Mussolini and his Blackshirts, well before Hitler and the Brownshirts, and still several years out from Sir Oswald Mosely and his own Black Gang of would be traitors.

   Sapper’s overgrown bully boys aren’t that far off from Sherlock Holmes taking the law into his own hands, the Scarlet Pimpernel’s League, or even the Saint’s war on boredom, just a bit less smooth and suave about it. There is no excuse, but you can’t judge the book or Sapper based on what happened over a decade later. No one really understood, not even the victims, until if was too late.

   But judge The Black Gang on its own merits and it is one of the best of the Drummond books. The incidents are exciting, Drummond is probably at his most attractive (and least annoying), and as a thriller it is first rate entertainment. There are some splendid set pieces such as when Peterson’s men are hunting Drummond who picks them off one by one in the dark, and the final confrontation with Yulowski and Peterson, and in Drummond’s defense Peterson’s victims number in the hundreds.

   Carl may be a charming monster, but he’s a monster none the less, who plots to overthrow England for nothing more than his own financial improvement and a distaste for England and the English. Carl believes in nothing but Carl and is loyal to no cause but his own.

   The Black Gang came to the screen as The Return of Bulldog Drummond (not based on the book of that name) with Ralph Richardson as Drummond and Francis L. Sullivan a fine Peterson.

   The Black Gang was present in black leather and on motorbikes, but some of the less appealing aspects of the book were left off. It’s not a bad little movie, and Richardson is quite good (ironically he plays the villain in the spoof Bulldog Jack penned by Sapper and Gerard Fairlie) looking forward to the role in Q Planes (Clouds Over Europe) where his suave British agent would inspire the creation of John Steed of the Avengers.

    Drummond found his way to the screen as early as the silents, but it was 1929’s talkie Bulldog Drummond with Ronald Colman as Drummond, Joan Bennett as Phyllis, and Montagu Love as Peterson that really put the character in the public eye. It seems strange today when we note Colman was nominated for an Academy Award playing Drummond (stranger still that he was beaten by Warner Baxter in In Old Arizona playing the Cisco Kid).

   Temple Tower (a lost film), The Return of …, and Bulldog Drummond At Bay (with American John Lodge coming physically closest to Sapper’s interpretation of Drummond) followed, but it’s 1934’s Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back that inspired the series that followed.

   Ronald Colman was again Drummond, Charles Butterworth a droll Algy (and Ona Munson his long suffering bride), Loretta Young the lady in danger, Sir C. Aubrey Smith Colonel Neilson Drummond’s friend at the Yard, and no less than Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu Warner Oland as an Egyptian prince involved in dastardly doings.

   It is one of the brightest mystery comedies of an age when the form was at its peak and still holds up today thanks to fine performances, direction, and script. It was also a big hit and inspired a series of B films. The first was Bulldog Drummond Escapes with Ray Milland as Drummond, but the series proper featured John Howard (who played Colman’s younger brother in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon), Reginald Denny as Algy, E. E. Clive as Drummond’s servant Tenny (changed from Denny in the novels for obvious reasons), and John Barrymore as Neilson (eventually replaced by veteran H.B. Warner).

   A running gag had Drummond’s pending marriage to Phyllis (Louise Campbell and later Heather Angel) always being put off by his latest adventure. The series was well produced and written, and had a fine array of villains including George Zucco, Porter Hall, Leo G. Carroll, Anthony Quinn, and Eduardo Cianelli.

   When the Howard series ended Tom Conway and Ron Randell each did two Drummond films, and in 1951, Victor Saville did an A picture, Calling Bulldog Drummond, based on one of Fairlie’s books (and written by him) with Walter Pidgeon as Drummond and a supporting cast that included David Tomlinson (Father in Mary Poppins) as Algy, Margaret Leighton as an undercover policewoman, Robert Beatty (who would play Drummond in a television pilot aired on the Douglas Fairbanks Jr,. Show) as a gangster, and James Bond’s future M, Bernard Lee in a key role.

   Save for the television pilot Drummond lay in doggo until 1966 when he was revived for two Bondish outings starring Richard Johnson as an updated Drummond, Deadlier Than the Male and Some Girls Do. Both films are fun, with a deadly game of chess on a giant board an excellent set piece in the first one, and Nigel Green outstanding as Peterson. (James Villiers is only a little less perfect in the second film.) Elke Summer and Sylvia Koscina in the first and Daliah Lavi in the second are Peterson’s murderous cohorts.

   Drummond also had a long and successful career on radio (�Out of the fog, out of the night …”) in a series starring Santos Ortega and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. In 2006 Moonstone Comics brought Drummond back in a comic book written by William Messner Loebs in which Drummond becomes a sort of private detective and we discover Phyllis and Irma are one and the same.

It’s a terrific little adventure that remains true to Sapper’s Drummond while updating many aspect of the story. Drummond also features in Kim Newman’s second book in his Anno Dracula trilogy, The Bloody Red Baron, as a nasty vampire, and a psychotic violent old prig in the third volume of Alan Moore’s graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.

   Seems you can’t keep a good — or bad — man down. There is even a play and movie by Alan Shearman, Bullshot Crummond, that is a dead on send up of all things Drummond.

   Drummond has been around close to ninety years now, and is still going fairly strong. The name still evokes foggy roads, low slung speeding sports cars, dastardly villains, and dangerous adventure with pitched battles in which the fate of nations is at stake.

   Leslie Charteris modeled the early Saint on Drummond (but he was a much better writer) and Doc Savage and his crew owe more than at little to Drummond and his.

   Mickey Spillane was a fan, as was Ian Fleming. (British traitor Guy Burgess supposedly observed that James Bond was Bulldog Drummond to the waist and Mike Hammer from the waist down.) More recently Clive Cussler has mentioned Drummond as a major influence on Dirk Pitt. When Paul Gallico reviewed Casino Royale he called James Bond “Bulldog Drummond with brains.”

   The first seven books in the Drummond series (Bulldog Drummond, The Black Gang, The Third Round, The Final Count, Female of the Species, The Return of Bulldog Drummond, and Temple Tower can be found online in free ebook editions with a little searching.

   Jim Maitland, and at least three of the short story collections are available too. The Howard films are easy (and inexpensive) to find on DVD, Deadlier Than the Male and Some Girls Do are a bit more expensive but also available in handsome DVD packages.

   The pilot film with Robert Beatty can be found on some sets of old television detective series. Calling Bulldog Drummond often shows up on TCM as it was an MGM film. Most of the others can be found on the gray market with the exception of Temple Tower and the silent Drummonds.

   The first Colman film is in public domain and can be downloaded direct to your PC. Several old-time radio sites offer free episodes of the radio series you can listen to or download, and cassettes and CDs of many episodes are available as well.

   The Fairlie books, some of which were not published in the United States, are a bit harder to find than the original Sapper books, but none of them are really all that difficult with a little effort. There are also five Drummond short stories (the best known being “The Thirteen Lead Soldiers” basis for one of the Conway films) collected for the first time in The Best Short Stories By Sapper.

   Bulldog Drummond is still with us. He can be a bit noisy, and he has a tendency to blather in the way of heroes of his era, but he’s good company on an adventure where the stakes are high and the odds are dicey.

   Before you dismiss him you might keep in mind that half the books on the shelves of the mystery and thriller genre owe something to him. He’s a bit like one of those uncles that you love, but sometimes hate to admit you are related to. But bless him or damn him, he’s one of the family, and the resemblance can’t be denied.

THOMAS GIFFORD – The Glendower Legacy.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1978. Paperback reprint: Pocket, 1979.

   The world of academia scores a couple of telling blows to the ungodly in this, the latest thriller to come from the typewriter of the author of the highly acclaimed The Wind Chill Factor, but otherwise not all is well.

   To borrow a term from the incomparable Mr. Hitchcock of movie fame, the MacGuffin, the object that all parties devoutly desire but which in fact may be all that keeps the plot moving, is a document dating from the days of the American Revolution — from Valley Forge, to be precise, at a time when morale was low and the ravages of dysentery were visibly high.

   Betrayal at any moment, even by the commander-in-chief himself, given the right conditions and frame of mind, was a distinct possibility.

   If this document could be authenticated, the resulting scandal would rock the nation, and a director of the Russian KGB with a sense of humor takes a serious interest as well. The scene shifts dramatically to Harvard Square and then to the remotest crannies of Maine before heading even further north, to a massive house located high up on the rocks of the Nova Scotia coast.

   The hero, taking the role that Cary Grant would play, is a naive, middle-aged professor of American history, and in spite of their initial mutual antagonisms, when he takes refuge in the home of the fiercely liberated TV newsperson (Audrey Hepburn), you know that everything is just going to work out all right.

   Harvard, however, will hardly be the same. Bodies pile up, torture scenes (with pliers) abound — and, you might ask — for what?

   Successful combinations of comedy, blood and suspense can be done. They are a specialty of the Mr. Hitchcock previously referred to. Gifford can weave a nasty spell with words, but the enormous improbability of such a sequence of events, given the timetable suggested, drags the early part of the story into a morass of page-flipping, and the jagged abruptness with which it’s all wrapped up only points out the lack of solid substance throughout.

   Nothing is gained. Pessimistically a number of lives are lost, and the pretense that it’s all in good fun can’t be maintained forever.

   Definitely written with the movies in mind, and it could very well make a good one. It’s flashy and glib, and the weaknesses in the foundation can be easily overlooked. After the end of the book is reached — and believe me, once started, you most definitely will — that’s when the sugar-coating will be recognized, alas, for what it is.

   Artificial, that is, and not altogether satisfying.

Bibliography —     

      The Wind Chill Factor, Putnam, 1975.
      The Cavanaugh Quest, Putnam, 1976. (Nominated for the Edgar Award, Best Novel, 1977.)

      The Man from Lisbon, McGraw, 1977.
      The Glendower Legacy, Putnam, 1978.
      Hollywood Gothic, Putnam, 1979.
      The Assassini, Bantam, 1990.
      Praetorian, Bantam, 1993.
      The First Sacrifice, Bantam, 1994.
      Saint’s Rest, Bantam, 1996.

as Thomas Maxwell —

      Kiss Me Once, Mysterious Press, 1986.

      The Saberdene Variations, Mysterious Press, 1987.
      Kiss Me Twice, Mysterious Press, 1998.
      The Suspense Is Killing Me, Mysterious Press, 1990.

as Dana Clarins —

      Woman in the Window, Bantam, pbo, 1984.

      Guilty Parties, Bantam, pbo, 1985.
      The Woman Who Knew Too Much, Bantam, pbo, 1986.

[UPDATE] 06-14-09.   I mentioned The Wind Chill Factor in the opening paragraph, a reference that was more useful when this review first appeared, as the book is all but forgotten now.

   In fact August West reviewed it as just that not so long ago on his blog, as one of Patti Abbott’s “Friday Forgotten Books” project. It’s a spy thriller that starts out in Minnesota, but it quickly goes international with a stirred-up nest of neo-Nazis.

   I reviewed it myself back when it first came out, and one of these days I’ll come across it again, so maybe my review (also positive) will show up here some day as well.

   I wrote this review a few years before the movie I predicted did come out, and of course I was right about that, but I was wrong about who the stars were going to be.

   The movie was called Dirty Tricks — and are you ready for this? — the stars were Elliott Gould and Kate Jackson. Passable choices, perhaps, but they were never to be confused with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and the inclusion of Rich Little as one of the players shows what the primary thrust of the movie was.

   I’ve not seen it myself, but its rating on IMDB is 4.4 out of 10, which is Not Very Good.

   The passing of author Tedd Thomey was not known to the crime fiction community until quite recently, when Al Hubin came across the news as he was recently putting data together for the online Addenda to his Revised Crime Fiction IV.

   (Note that Part 33 has just been uploaded. This installment is much shorter and earlier than usual, but in time, Al hopes, for the information to be included in the 2009 edition of the Revised CFIV on CD-Rom.)

   Mr. Thomey died on December 1st of last year. A tribute to him by Tom Hennessy, a longtime friend, can be found online here, along with several photographs.

      Some excerpts:

    “Harold John Thomey was born July 19, 1920, in Butte, Mont. His father, who admired Theodore Roosevelt, called him Teddy. The second ‘d’ in Tedd was an affectation, added by a young man hoping to be noticed.”

    Storming Iwo Jima: “Tedd landed with the Fifth Marine Division in the Third Wave . He hunkered down in a shell crater. That’s where he was when a bullet pierced his heel and his boot filled with blood. Removed to a hospital ship, he was eating ice cream that night while his buddies tried to establish a foothold on the beach.

    “He cried the first time he told me of eating ice cream while his buddies fought for a toehold on the beach. He cried the second time, too.”

    After the war: “Tedd became a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, whose photo staff included [Iwo Jima photographer Joe] Rosenthal. They remained friends until Rosenthal’s death two years ago.

    “Tedd also began writing pulp fiction articles, then turned to books, 18 in all, including The Big Love. It was about actor Erroll Flynn’s love affair with 15-year-old Beverly Aadland. Told to Tedd by her mother, Florence, it became a Broadway play starring Tracey Ullman.

    “He also did profiles of celebrities, most assigned to him by his New York agent, Scott Meredith. Among his subjects: Humphrey Bogart, Peter Sellers, Judy Garland and Peter O’Toole.”

      Bibliographic data.   [Crime fiction only, expanded from the Revised CFIV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

THOMEY, TEDD. Full name: Harold John Thomey, 1920-2008.

      And Dream of Evil (n.) Abelard-Schuman, hc, 1954; Avon 614, pb, 1956. [Los Angeles, CA]

      Killer in White (n.) Gold Medal 546, pbo, 1956 [Los Angeles, CA]

      I Want Out (n.) Ace Double D-401, pbo, 1959

      The Sadist (n.) Berkley G-568, pbo, 1960 [Oregon]
       -When the Lusting Began (n.) Monarch 178, pbo, 1960

      Flight to Takla-Ma (n.) Monarch 216, pbo, 1962 [China]

      The Prodigy Plot (n.) Warner, pbo, 1987

[UPDATE] Later the same day. Thanks to Juri Nummelin who points out on his Pulpetti blog another website dedicated to Tedd Thomey’s books, including his non-criminous ones.

   A few weeks ago Turner Classic Movies presented yet another film of the Thirties which, had it been made in the Forties, would have been accepted by everyone as film noir.

   I refer to Crime and Punishment (Columbia, 1935), based on Dostoevski’s classic novel. For obvious budgetary reasons director Josef von Sternberg makes no attempt to recreate mid-19th-century St. Petersburg, and we are told in an opening title that the story could take place at any time and anywhere.

   This is why the protagonist’s name morphs from Rodion to Roderick Raskolnikov, and also why we never see any automobiles or horse-drawn vehicles or any other form of transportation that might give us a clue to whether we are in the 19th or the 20th century.

   Amid grotesque shadows and bizarre camera angles, Peter Lorre in his first role after escaping from Hitler’s Europe played Raskolnikov — how could that whiny, sweaty, pop-eyed little toad have ever imagined himself to be an Ubermensch above the law? — while the police detective Porfiry Petrovich was played by Edward Arnold, who the following year would be cast, for one film only, as Nero Wolfe.

   If you missed the TCM debut of this version of Crime and Punishment, watch for it when next it’s shown.

   Speaking of Nero, it was my good fortune that I began reading Rex Stout in the late 1950s, when I was in my middle teens and also pigging out on a dozen or more TV Western series a week.

   Why was this a lucky break for me? Because one of those Western series saved me from misunderstanding Archie Goodwin.

   If you were following the Wolfe saga during the Hammett-Chandler era when the novels and novellas were first coming out, you might easily have tried to assimilate Archie to the legion of wisecracking PI/first person narrators of the time, and then rejected the character when you sensed what a poor fit that was.

   Even so astute a critic as John Dickson Carr, writing in 1946, referred to Archie as “insufferable” and a “latter-day Buster Brown.”

   But if you were fortunate enough to discover Stout in the late Fifties, at a time when millions of Americans including myself were watching Maverick every Sunday evening, you might have recognized Archie Goodwin and Bret Maverick as soul brothers.

   You might have credited Rex Stout with having created in prose the Great American Wiseass prototype which James Garner brought to perfection on film. You might have longed to see one of Stout’s novels filmed with Orson Welles as Wolfe and Garner as Archie. At least I did. What a shame that it never happened!

   When did TV movies begin? The first films that networks called by that name were broadcast in the fall of 1964. But if a TV movie is a feature-length film that tells a continuous story and was first seen in a single installment, the genre dates back at least to the suspense thrillers and Westerns that were aired one week out of four, beginning in the fall of 1956, as part of the prestigious CBS anthology series Playhouse 90 (1956-61).

   As a young teen I watched some of those films. Until recently the only one I had revisited as an adult was So Soon to Die (January 17, 1957), starring Richard Basehart and Anne Bancroft and based on the novel of the same name by Jeremy York, one of the many bylines of the hyper-prolific John Creasey (1908-1973).

   A few weeks ago I came upon another, one that I hadn’t seen in more than half a century. The Dungeon (April 10, 1958), written and directed by David Swift, starred Dennis Weaver as a man who, after being acquitted of murder, is kidnapped by a psychotic ex-judge and locked up in a cell in the attic of his isolated mansion, along with several other acquitted defendants.

   A great noir premise and a great cast to boot — Paul Douglas, Julie Adams, Agnes Moorehead, Patty McCormack, Patrick McVey, Thomas Gomez, Werner Klemperer, the list goes on and on. And the tension is heightened by the magnificently ominous music of a never credited Bernard Herrmann.

   I wish Swift had provided a backstory to explain what turned the judge into a sociopath, and my mind, not to say my nose, boggles when I start wondering how his prisoners (one of whom has been held for more than a year!) ever showered or kept clean-shaven or changed clothes. But if you have the good fortune to find this film on DVD as I did, it’s well worth seeing and, thanks to Herrmann, hearing.

   The Poetry Corner has been on sabbatical lately but I need to bring it back in order to tout perhaps the finest detective novel to deal centrally with the subject.

   The author was Nicholas Blake, known outside our genre as C. Day Lewis (1904-1972), poet laureate of England and the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis. The detective, as always except in Blake’s non-series crime novels, is Nigel Strangeways.

   The title is Head of a Traveler (1949). Thomas Leitch in his essay on Blake in Mystery and Suspense Writers, Volume 1 (Scribner, 1998), describes the novel as “one of his most tormentedly introverted. The central figure is the distinguished poet Robert Seaton, whose household is destroyed by the unexpected discovery of his vanished brother Oswald’s decapitated corpse. The events of the fatal night remain obscure even after Strangeways’ final explanation; the real interest of the novel is in its impassioned examination of the costs of poetry — the lengths to which poets and those who love them will go in pursuit of their craft.”

   Anthony Boucher in his short-lived “Speaking of Crime” column in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (August 1949) was a bit less enthusiastic: “Blake knows so much about his theme, the nature of poetic creation, that he never quite conveys it convincingly to the reader.”

   Whichever critic is right, when it comes to the intersection of crime fiction and poetry, Head of a Traveler remains the “locus classicus.”

MICHAEL ALLEN – Spence and the Holiday Murders. Walker, hardcover, first U.S. publication 1978. UK title: Spence in Petal Park: Constable, hc, 1977. Paperback reprint: Dell, February 1981; Scene of the Crime #14.

   The season is Christmas, the victim is a swinging young bachelor with an unsuspected habit of snapping photos through the windows of the girls’ school across the way, and so the immediate conclusion is that someone was being blackmailed.

   As everyone has come to expect of the British police procedural, Detective, Superintendent Spence’s investigation is carried out so diligently and smoothly that it could as well serve as a primer for the novice mystery reader.

   Bibliographic data. [Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

ALLEN, MICHAEL (Derek) 1939- . Pseudonym: Michael Bradford. SC: Supt. Ben Spence, in all below:
       Spence in Petal Park. Constable 1977.
       Spence and the Holiday Murders. Walker 1978. Reprint of Spence in Petal Park.
       Spence at the Blue Bazaar. Constable 1979.

       Spence at Marlby Manor. Walker 1982.

BRADFORD, MICHAEL. Pseudonym of Michael Allen.
        Counter-Coup. Muller, hc, 1980; Critics Choice, pb, 1986. “Rebels overthrow the South African government and President Kasaboru is on the run with Philip Morgan, formerly of the Metropolitan Police.”

   The early literature of Eric Ambler belongs with such contemporaries as Graham Greene and Geoffrey Household: novels which plausibly construct their dark and ominous prophesies of quiet disaster and which find the power game, as played out by ordinary people on intercontinental trains and across shifting frontiers, more imaginatively stimulating than the one-man antics of the post-Ian Fleming era.

   Above all, Ambler’s novels have that air of confident enjoyment in the game they are playing which is so easily conveyed to the reader: his works are entertainments, in Greene’s sense of the word, and, undeniably, intelligent ones.

   It is a truism that Ambler was the founding father of the modern political thriller, the writer who brought the genre to maturity in the 1930s. In just six novels, from The Dark Frontier in 1936 to Journey into Fear, 1940, he created the distinctive form that was to have a seminal influence on all writers in the genre.

   In the late 1930s, he had strong anti-fascist leanings and his stories reflected the political tensions of the time, when Europe was about to explode. Before he rewrote the conventions of the spy thriller, the genre was epitomised by Sapper’s thuggish Bulldog Drummond and Buchan’s Hannay, officer-class heroes with little more than a gung-ho approach to life and its problems.

   Moreover, detective stories of the day (by the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers) were considered respectable; thrillers in the former vein were not. Happily, Ambler changed all that.

   His heroes were genuinely ordinary people, amateurs of a kind closer to Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden. They stumbled into complex situations, where they had to make tough choices under pressure. A romantic sense of Ruritania gave way to a more precise Italy, France and Turkey preparing for a second world war.

   As we know, four of his six pre-war novels became films (of varying merit). The Mask of Dimitrios (Warner Bros, 1944; from A Coffin for Dimitrios) and Journey into Fear (RKO, 1943) remain consistently enjoyable with a nice tangle of mystery and suspense.

   Background to Danger (WB, 1943; from Uncommon Danger) provides a suitably menacing, violent atmosphere for Greenstreet and Lorre to display their familiar brand of icy unpleasantness.

   The British production, Hotel Reserve (RKO, 1944; from Epitaph for a Spy), already reviewed and discussed in detail here, looked better (thanks to camera operator Arthur Ibbetson) than it perhaps deserved.

   For the most part, the television work of an author (whether as adaptations of their work or as original teleplays) is generally regarded — when it is regarded at all — as less than worthy of interest. My view is that all of an author’s work is of interest. The TV representations of Ambler’s work are, admittedly, more often less-than-rewarding but are still worthy of examination.

   His earliest work to appear in a television translation was the espionage thriller Epitaph for a Spy (1953), a BBC-produced six-part serial dramatised by Giles Cooper and featuring Peter Cushing as the innocent-in-a-spot teacher Josef Vadassy. The following year, CBS adapted the story (drawing on the services of three writers) for their anthology series Climax! (CBS, 1954-58), starring Edward G. Robinson as the frightened, bumbling character.

   BBC-TV returned to Ambler’s story again in 1963 for a four-part serial (dramatised by the usually dependable Elaine Morgan). Unfortunately, the producers, seemingly lacking confidence in the 1938 work, decided to condense the story into four instalments and, of all things, update it to the 1960s (changing nationalities, providing new motives and readjusting relationships). It is indeed unfortunate that the 1953 BBC version no longer exists; it should be considered a small mercy that there is no sign of a recording of the 1963 ‘satire’.

   Although A Coffin for Dimitrios was not afforded an adaptation for television as such, the basic plot turned up as “Satan’s Veil” (1956), an episode of the Warner Bros. TV drama Casablanca (ABC, 1955-56).

   The storyline (presumably a Warner property since their 1944 The Mask of Dimitrios) was reworked in the form of an adventuress (the sultry Rossana Rory) trying to conceal the details of her faked death from Charles McGraw’s hard-boiled Rick.

   Considering that other WB works were given a small-screen adaptation (“Casablanca”, in 1955; “Mildred Pierce”, 1956; “To Have and Have Not”, 1957, etc.) via the adventurous Lux Video Theatre (CBS/NBC, 1950-57), one wonders why the perfect-for-TV Dimitrios was overlooked.

   The other Climax! presentation was a lamentable “Journey into Fear” (1956) with a quivering John Forsythe as a terrified-out-of-his-wits American engineer whose life is endangered in Istanbul and then shipboard to Genoa by ever-present assassins. Hitchcock television regular James P. Cavanagh adapted Ambler’s 1940 novel.

   The Schirmer Inheritance (ITV, 1957), involving a New York attorney’s search for the rightful heir to a $4,000,000 inheritance, was adapted into a six-part serial by Kenneth Hyde for Britain’s ABC-TV company. Not so much a wary passage through post-war Europe (in the Greene/Third Man vein) as a gallery of suspicious figures in a rather over-talky journey to a bandits’ lair on the Yugoslav-Greek border.

   Ambler moved to Hollywood in the late 1950s and, in 1958, married long-time Hitchcock collaborator producer-writer Joan Harrison, who was at that time producing the Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS/NBC, 1955-62) and Suspicion (NBC, 1957-59) anthologies.

   For the latter collection (where he met Harrison), Ambler wrote the soft mystery “The Eye of Truth” (1958) featuring Joseph Cotton as a blackmailed corrupt attorney who’s trying to cover up some incriminating documents. In 1962 he was brought on-board the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series to adapt a Nicholas Monsarrat short story as the episode “Act of Faith” (1962) in which an aspiring author seeks finance from a successful novelist, with unexpected repercussions. (This was Ambler’s second adaptation of a Monsarrat work; the first, the screenplay for the 1953 wartime drama The Cruel Sea, earned him an Oscar nomination.)

   Perhaps his most curious and direct television contribution was as creator of the mystery series Checkmate (CBS, 1960-62), an often satisfying who’s-going-to-do-it drama involving a trio of San Francisco private investigators: their job, and the series’ hook, being to prevent crimes before they happen.

   Although it was intimated at the series’ launch that Ambler himself would be contributing original stories, the series did employ the tantalising talents of many respected crime-mystery writers, including Leigh Brackett, Jonathan Latimer and William P. McGivern. The hugely enjoyable “The Terror from the East” (1961) episode (written by Harold Clements), with a highly suspicious, shambling Charles Laughton as a visiting missionary from China, has our heroes running in circles like hypnotised rabbits.

   A later, similarly formatted series, The Most Deadly Game (ABC, 1970-71), created by Mort Fine and David Friedkin (for Aaron Spelling Productions), featured three criminologists who, rather than preventing crimes, engaged in solving offbeat whodunits. Since Joan Harrison was one of the series’ producers (along with Fine & Friedkin) one can be less than surprised by the similarity.

   Although some modern sources have credited Ambler with the development of The Most Deadly Game, Fine and Friedkin are the only ones to receive a ‘created by’ credit.

   An additional point of interest: a co-writer credit for the episode “Model for Murder” (1970) goes to the fascinating but elusive Elick Moll who, in collaboration with Frank Partos, wrote the screenplay for the hauntingly Woolrichian Night Without Sleep (20th Fox, 1952), based on Moll’s original treatment (and published as a novel in 1951).

   For Alcoa Premiere’s “Pattern of Guilt” (1962), Ambler, as producer of the episode, hired Helen Nielsen to compose an original teleplay for what may have been a proposed series’ pilot episode. The story involved Ray Milland as a reporter who is assigned to cover a series of murders, all spinsters, where related clues are found at each murder scene. Little seems known about this one; why Ambler suddenly became a producer (if in fact so), was it actually intended to spin-off a Milland-as-reporter series?

   Following up the association with Aaron Spelling Productions, Ambler wrote and Harrison produced Love, Hate, Love (ABC, 1971), an annoyingly tedious TV movie thriller starring Ryan O’Neal and Lesley Warren as a couple stalked by Warren’s psychotic ex-boyfriend (Peter Haskell).

   The next of Ambler’s spy stories to be adapted for the small screen was the four-part A Quiet Conspiracy (ITV, 1989). Taken from his 1969 novel The Intercom Conspiracy, the post-le Carré plot follows former journalist Joss Ackland and his daughter Sarah Winman as they stumble about in an international conspiracy involving a secret NATO spy satellite. The red herring fishery was worked overtime, thanks to producer Anglia TV’s co-production casting of various, unfamiliar European actors.

   With The Care of Time (ITV,1990), another made-for-TV film (Anglia TV), adapted from Ambler’s 1981 novel, the central character, an American ghost writer (a baffled Michael Brandon), is an outsider who is drawn into an overly-complicated web of international intrigue.

   The puzzling plotting and colourful scenery moves (totters, at times) from Pennsylvania, across Europe to the Austrian Alps, collecting Christopher Lee’s political fixer, who’s ducking his enemies, and his attractive body-guard (Yolanda Vazquez) along the way. An ambitious TV film with a reach that was greater than its grasp.

   A couple of Footnotes: one of relevance to the above television work; the other because it’s an irresistible connection.

(I) In 1965, US trade journals began making brief, intriguing references to the production of a pilot episode (“The Seller’s Market”), written by Ambler, for a proposed espionage series called Journey Into Fear for NBC; the episodes would revolve around star Jeffrey Hunter as a scientist who is drawn into working for the CIA.

   Completed (and an hour in length), the series was rejected by the network and the pilot episode was despatched to the vaults. Perhaps the partnership of Ambler and the 1960s Spy Boom would have been an awkward one (he had a dislike for master-villains, pseudo-scientific gadgets and the general paraphernalia that characterised the 1960s spy genre), but the possibilities still fire the imagination.

   For a fuller report on this unsold series, check this link for Glenn Mosley’s (University of Idaho) absorbing survey.

(II) Geoffrey Household merits some reference here, not only because Ambler wrote the screenplay for Rough Shoot (1953; aka Shoot First), based on his 1951 novel, but that Household’s espionage/adventure characters belong to the same fold as Ambler’s victims of circumstance.

   His most famous work is of course Rogue Male (1939), becoming the much praised Fritz Lang film Man Hunt in 1941 and, in 1976, an equally commendable TV film starring Peter O’Toole. Another TV film, Deadly Harvest (1972), was made from his 1961 novel Watcher in the Shadows.

   Two early Suspense (CBS, 1949-54) episodes based on Household stories (“Death Drum”, 29 Jan 1952; “Woman in Love”, 26 Aug 1952) can be viewed on the Internet Archive. (Follow the links provided.)

            Eric Ambler Television:

1. Epitaph for a Spy (serial; BBC, 14 March-18 Apr 1953; 6 x half-hour). Producer/Director: Stephen Harrison. Scr: Giles Cooper, from 1938 novel. Cast: Peter Cushing (as Vadassy), Ferdy Mayne, Warren Stanhope, Joan Winmill.

2. “Epitaph for a Spy” / Climax! (CBS, 9 Dec 1954). Dir: Allen Reisner. Scr: Donald S. Sanford, David Friedkin, from Ambler novel. Cast: Edward G. Robinson (Vadassy), Melville Cooper, Marjorie Lord, Dave O’Brien.

3. “Satan’s Veil” / Casablanca (ABC, 31 Jan 1956). Dir: Alvin Ganzer. Scr: Norman Lessing, Nelson Gidding, from ‘story’ by Ambler. Cast: Charles McGraw, Marcel Dalio, Rossana Rory, Dan Seymour.

4. “Journey into Fear” / Climax! (CBS, 11 Oct 1956). Dir: Jack Smight. Scr: James P. Cavanagh, from 1940 novel. Cast: John Forsythe (as Graham Johnson), Eva Gabor, Arnold Moss, Anthony Dexter.

5. The Schirmer Inheritance (serial; ITV, 3 Aug-7 Sept 1957; 6 x half-hour). Prod: Stuart Latham. Dir: Philip Dale. Scr: Kenneth Hyde, from 1953 novel. Cast: William Sylvester, Vera Fusek, Jefferson Clifford.

6. “The Eye of Truth” / Suspicion (NBC, 17 Mar 1958). Prod: Alfred Hitchcock. Dir: Robert Stevens. Scr: Eric Ambler. Cast: Joseph Cotton, George Peppard, Leora Dana, Philip Van Zandt.

7. Checkmate (series; CBS, 1960-62). Created by Eric Ambler. Regular Cast: Anthony George (as Don Corey), Doug McClure (Jed Sills), Sebastian Cabot (Dr. Carl Hyatt).

8. “Pattern of Guilt” / Alcoa Premiere (ABC, 9 Jan 1962). Prod: Eric Ambler. Dir: Bernard Girard. Scr: Helen Nielsen. Cast: Ray Milland, Myron McCormick, Joanna Moore, Olive Carey.

9. “Act of Faith” / Alfred Hitchcock Presents (NBC, 10 Apr 1962). Dir: Bernard Girard. Scr: Eric Ambler, based on a story by Nicholas Monsarrat. Cast: George Grizzard, Dennis King, Florence MacMichael, Jeno Mate.

10. Epitaph for a Spy (serial; BBC, 19 May-9 Jun 1963; 4 x half-hour). Prod/Dir: Dorothea Brooking. Scr: Elaine Morgan, from Ambler novel. Cast: Colin Jeavons (Vadassy), Burnell Tucker, Janet McIntire.

11. Love, Hate, Love (TV film; ABC, 9 Feb 1971). Dir: George McCowan. Scr: Eric Ambler, based on story by Ambler, Robert Summerfield. Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Lesley Ann Warren, Peter Haskell, Henry Jones.

12. A Quiet Conspiracy (serial; ITV, 24 Feb-17 Mar 1989; 4 x hour). Prod: John Rosenberg. Dir: John Gorrie. Scr: Alick Rowe, from 1969 novel The Intercom Conspiracy. Cast: Joss Ackland (as Theodore Carter), Sarah Winman, Hartmut Becker.

13. The Care of Time (TV film; ITV, 26 Aug 1990). Dir: John Davies. Scr: Alan Seymour, from Ambler novel. Cast: Christopher Lee, Yolanda Vazquez, Ian Hogg, Michael Brandon.

Footnote: “Seller’s Market” / Journey into Fear (1966 pilot episode; not transmitted). Prod: Joan Harrison. Dir: Robert Stevens. Scr: Eric Ambler. Cast: Jeffrey Hunter.

EDITORIAL COMMENT. Eric Ambler was born 28 June 1909, so next month will mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. We apologize for jumping the gun by a few days, but we welcome the opportunity to toast here and now one of the greatest spymasters of all time.

ROBERT TERRALL – Sand Dollars.

St. Martin’s Press; hardcover; 1st printing, 1978. Paperback reprint: Dell, 1979.

   There’s a lot of money floating around this world that most of us never get the slightest glimpse of. Tax shelters for the rich being in high demand, a great deal of this money accumulates in out-of-the-way places like regulation-free Grand Cayman Island. When the mild-mannered accountant who first discovered this Caribbean financial paradise turns down the Mafia as a silent partner in his operations, he’s forced to turn to bank robbery in retaliation and as a means for sheer survival.

   What results is a lusty tale of greed and marital infidelity, spiced with numerous feats of sexual superheroism. Unfortunately none of the hapless, amoral creatures involved arouse much sympathy when things don’t work out quite as planned, and the story crumbles into what’s left of sand castles when the tide comes in, as it inevitably does.

[UPDATE] 05-27-09. This is a scarce book. Only 12 copies come for sale on ABE, for example, but unless you’re fussy about condition, you aren’t likely to have to pay very much for it, either.

   When I wrote the review, I may or may not have known that Robert Terrall was much more famous under several of his pen names: Robert Kyle, John Gonzales, and Brett Halliday (ghost-writing for Davis Dresser).

   The list of mystery fiction that was published under his own name is small, and at least one is be a reprint of another title as by someone else. Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s his entry there, excluding his work under other aliases:

TERRALL, ROBERT. 1914-2009.

      They Deal in Death. Simon & Schuster, hc, 1943.

      Madam Is Dead. Duell, Sloane & Pearce, hc, 1947.
      A Killer Is Loose Among Us. Duell, Sloane & Pearce, hc, 1948.

      Shroud for a City. Australia: Original Novels, pb, 1956. [US title?]
      Sand Dollars. St. Martin’s, hc, 1978.
      Kill Now, Pay Later. Hard Case Crime, pb, 2007. Previously published as by Robert Kyle (Dell, pbo, 1960).

   Robert Terrall was 94 years old when died on March 27th earlier this year. An excellent overview of his career can be found here on The Rap Sheet blog, along with an interview editor J. Kingston Pierce did with Ben Terrall, the author’s son and a free-lancer writer himself.

   If you missed it before, please don’t hesitate in jumping over and reading it now. If you’re a fan of vintage Gold Medal style literature, you’ll be glad you did.

   I know a lot of classical detective fans don’t care for MacDonald because he tends toward suspense and even melodrama, but I’ve always thought his best books a sort of antidote to the driest and most formal of the golden age.

   I love a good puzzler, but some of the practitioners sometimes forgot that one of the essential parts of the definition of mystery involves some sort of emotional response, not merely intellectual stimulation. Only Freeman ever managed to be dull and interesting, and Dr. Thorndyke is a hard act to follow and most got the dull part right, but not the interesting part.

   Thorndyke is unique among fictional detectives in that he came first, and then the real life model, Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Most people don’t realise how much impact Thorndyke had on actual forensic investigation. I don’t know if it still is that way, but the box the forensic kit used to be carried in was always green after Thorndyke’s green forensics kit.

   Much of the actual procedure of evidence collection used by the Yard and then by police around the world was taken from Freeman’s descriptions, and the actual forensics box based on his.

   I ran across a terrific article in a 1914 issue of the New York Times on their archive site. Seems when Thomas Hanshew, author of the “Cleek, Man of Forty Faces” books (John Dickson Carr was a huge fan), was suspected to have been Bertha M. Clay when he died.

   Hanshew, an actor who was one of Ellen Terry’s stock company, and died in England where he was living (and where the Cleek books are set), was a hugely prolific writer who wrote some 150 novels.

   Clay, who was Charlotte M. Brame, was a popular writer of books for women (notably young women) whose work was issued in paperbound editions similar to the Nick Carter Nickel Library.

   When she died in 1884 Street and Smith were unwilling to give up the golden goose, and apparently Hanshew, John Corryell (Nick Carter), and others took over, sometime writing from her notes, other times probably writing their own books.

   The article is particularly kind to both Hanshew and Clay, and not the least snobbish (well, a little when it refers to her young female readers with mint on their breath — waiting in vain, we assume, for that first kiss), and even gives a few examples of how Hanshew changed Clay’s originals to his own style.

   The article comes complete with a very nice drawing of Hanshew, who was a handsome fellow. If you have never read the Hanshew books, many of them can be downloaded from Google Books On-Line library, and while they are full of melodrama and over the top writing, you will begin to see what Carr liked about them. I freely admit I sometimes get my fill of the literary and want something bad but fun. Hanshew made the cut in Bill Pronzini’s Gun in Cheek books, and deserves it. He is a true alternative classic.

   Hanshew doesn’t play fair as a detective novelist, but Cleek is an interesting character. The heir of a royal throne, he is the finest cracksman in London (The Vanishing Cracksman), but as usual true love turns his hand and he reforms, being hired by Maverick Narkom (great name) Superintendent of Scotland Yard as a consulting detective.

   High handed and theatrical (as you might expect from an actor) the books are bad writing at its best. One of the stories seems to me may have been the source for one of Dorothy Sayers Wimsey shorts, the one where Lord Peter finds the sculptor is hiding real bodies in his bronzes.

   Impossible crimes and locked rooms are common stuff, but the solutions are often of the poison unknown to science type. The Google edition available of Cleek of Scotland Yard includes the photos from either a silent film or play (I’m not sure which).

   Little as either Clay or Hanshew is known now, it seem strange that they should have merited a New York Times article in 1914. Anyway, sometime you might treat yourself to a taste of Cleek, his true love Alicia, his servant Dollops, Mr. Maverick Narkom, and Margot, Queen of the Apaches (French Apaches, not American ones). Readers once read this breathlessly, and truth be told even today they can take your breath away, though not perhaps as they intended to.

MIKE ROSCOE – One Tear for My Grave. Crown, hardcover, 1955. Paperback reprints: Signet #1358, November 1956, cover: Robert Maguire; G2432, 1964.

   Call me a jaded old cynic, but when I saw the name “Mike Roscoe” on the cover of One Tear for My Grave, I somehow doubted that was the appellation his parents bestowed upon him at birth.

   In fact, a little digging in Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers and on the ?net revealed this was a joint pen name for two writers, both allegedly Private Detectives, who spun a half-dozen books in the mid-50s around the exploits of PI Johnny April.

    And they did rather a nice job, ladling out tough, bright, Chandler-esque prose, with a generous hand, lively and entertaining, with vivid action:

   Extravagant description:

   And the improbably-cantilevered women of a young man’s dreams:

   Prose like this can carry a book a long way, and for most of its brief length, Tear is a highly satisfying read, with a new twist wrinkling the end of each chapter, and a fresh corpse approximately twice a page.

   But then there’s the ending, and here I must carp: It’s just plain-damn sloppy. If a crime writer centers his book around Who-killed-so-and-so, that becomes a sort of important issue in the narrative. So when the cops tell our hero that all the major suspects have alibis, we readers should either take that as a given, or get to see the PI break down whatever alibis must needs get broken.

   Not here. I can say without revealing anything important that although the killer is given a clean bill early on, s/he turns out to be the killer with nary a word of explanation.

   It just ain’t fair.

   Fortunately, this unsatisfactory ending comes fairly late in the book, and doesn’t spoil what is for the most part, a lot of good fun. I’ll be looking for more “Mike Roscoe” and I recommend this one to anyone who likes a bright, fast-moving hard-boiled mystery.

      Bibliographic data:  [expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin]

ROSCOE, MIKE. Pseudonym of John Roscoe & Michael Ruso. SC: PI Johnny April, in all.
      Death Is a Round Black Ball. Crown, hc, 1952. Signet 966, pb, Oct 1952.
      Riddle Me This. Crown, hc, 1952. Signet 1060, pb, Sept 1953.
      Slice of Hell. Crown, hc, 1954. Signet 1216, pb, July 1955.

      One Tear for My Grave. Crown, hc, 1955. Signet 1358, pb, Nov 1956.
      The Midnight Eye. Ace Double D273, pbo, 1958.

    H. J. S. Anderton is hardly an author who is or ever was a household name, but Steve Holland recently posted the results of his research into his life on his Bear Alley blog.

    A British writer, Anderton was responsible for nine crime thrillers that came out in the 1930s. The titles are included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, all published in cheap paperback form, but what Steve has come up with for the first time is his full name, the year he was born, when he died, and most amazingly, some information about his family.

    Anderton’s books are impossibly difficult to find, so I can’t show you a picture of one of his covers. Only a single copy of one of his books is offered for sale on ABE, a reprint copy of his first book, The League of the Yellow Skull.

    Steve mentions this book in the following paragraph, which I’m quoting in full:

    I think he’s referring to Yellow Claws, The Golden Idol, and Shadow of Chu Kong. All nine of Anderton’s books are now on my wish list, but I think I’m going to have to wish awfully hard.

      Bibliography   [taken from Crime Fiction IV] —

ANDERTON, H. J. S.
    The League of the Yellow Skull (n.) Mellifont 1932
    The Quest of the Crimson Idol (n.) Mellifont 1932
    “The Panther” (n.) Mellifont 1933
    The League of Death (n.) Mellifont 1934
    Yellow Claws (n.) Mellifont 1934
    The Golden Idol (n.) Mellifont 1936
    The Dope King (n.) Mellifont 1937
    The King of Crime (n.) Archer Croft 1940
    Shadow of Chu Kong (n.) Popular Fiction 1940