Q. PATRICK – Return to the Scene.

Books, Inc.; hardcover reprint, March 1944. First edition: Simon & Schuster/Inner Sanctum, 1941. Paperback reprint: Popular Library #47, ca. 1945. Serialized previously in The American Weekly as “The Green Diary.”

   I don’t know how long this website will stay up, but it presently contains loads and loads of the beautiful (if not exquisite) artwork that filled the covers of The American Weekly in its heyday. While the examples are all from 1918-1943, the magazine, a Sunday newspaper supplement for the Hearst chain, continued on through the years until the title changed to Pictorial Living in 1963, then folded for good in 1966. (Information obtained from Phil Stephensen-Payne’s magnificent Magazine Data File website.)

   Which is not relevant to anything more than the fact that this novel by Q. Patrick first appeared there, nothing more, but you really ought to see those covers.

   (I couldn’t resist. The one shown here is from 1941, the artist Joe Little, and as you see, one of the authors who had a story in that issue was Max Brand.)

   As for Q. Patrick, there is no way I am going to try to completely untangle the web of real names that lie behind that pen name and that of Patrick Quentin (and Jonathan Stagge). Suffice it to say that Return to the Scene was the result of the primary two collaborators who used that pseudonym, Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler. On other Q. Patrick titles, Webb had as partners, at various times, Martha Mott Kelley and Mary Louise Aswell — pairwise, mind you, not in triple tandem.

   It is interesting to note that Mary Aswell’s two efforts with Webb took place in 1933 (S. S. Murder) and 1935 (The Grindle Nightmare), and her single solo effort did not appear until 1957 (Far to Go).

   As for Patrick Quentin (and Jonathan Stagge), we’ll leave any discussion of who they were (and when) for another time, but as well known as practitioners of the Golden Age variety of detection, none of the various aliases, nor their books, are very well known today.

   Nor of course is Quentin/Patrick alone in this category. The rise and fall in popularity of various authors over the years is a subject that is likely to come up often in these pages in the days to come. Why, for example, are Agatha Christie’s books so timeless, and Borders has nothing on the shelves by Ellery Queen or Erle Stanley Gardner, and only a handful of titles by Rex Stout? John D. MacDonald’s books may be in print, but only from Amazon. I’ve not seen them on any actual bookstore shelves, new, in quite a while.

   Not that answers are likely to be very forthcoming and/or definitive, but the question at least will be something that will turn up in one of these review/commentaries every once in a while.

   Case in point. Return to the Scene, by Q. Patrick. Is it a book very likely to be published today? Answer, possibly, but not by a major publisher. Maybe by a small independent publisher like the Rue Morgue Press, which specializes in reprinting classic (and obscure) mysteries from the Golden Age, of which Return to the Scene is obviously one — and if you have gotten this far into this (which eventually will turn into a review), you really should be supporting them, and if you aren’t, then shame on you — or one of those publishers that specializes in large print editions for libraries, under the obvious assumption that only older people who can’t see so well any more will have any interest in reading them any more.

   It starts out like a romance novel — this is now the review — with Kay Winyard rushing to back to Bermuda to stop her niece from marrying the man she once thought she was in love with, before she discovered what kind of man he was and walked out on him. And in her purse is her weapon, a diary. A very revealing diary written by the woman who did marry him, in spite of Kay’s warning, and who subsequently killed herself because of him.

   It very quickly becomes instead a murder mystery, however, and there is no surprise to learn who the victim is. The rich, the powerful Ivor Drake, who is soon also very dead. And with a huge house of possible suspects, all of whom (it is also quickly discovered) had reasons to wish him that way.

   The police investigate, and for one reason or another, no one tells them the truth. Alibis are created out of happenstance and convenience. Every one has their own package of facts that they do not wish to be known, and webs of intrigue and would-be (and only reluctantly admitted) love affairs make learning the complete truth next to impossible even for Kay, who is an insider, much less Major Clifford, the ultimate outsider.

   Here’s a long quote from pages 116-117. It begins with Terry talking to his sister, Elaine. Elaine is the girl whose marriage Kay came back to Bermuda to stop:

   Alliances are built, along with the stories the players tell the police, then collapse, and bit by bit the truth gets put together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Delicious! There are clues aplenty, and the alibis so spontaneously constructed eventually cannot stand up under the pressure, and they begin to fall apart. Not one of the alibis, as it happens, is any good.

   The ending is disappointing, a little, but this (it seems to me) is what almost always happens. The explanation is so mundane, so unworthy, so why-didn’t-I-think-of that, but only, you realize, in comparison to the mystery itself.

   Another problem is that when the victim is so dastardly as this one is, one hates to see anyone found guilty of the crime, although of course someone must be, and in the end, all of the pieces fit together. (At least without a careful re-reading, all the way through, they do.)

   Not a classic, but in the Golden Age, even the non-classics came close.

PostScript: A preliminary checklist of titles in the Books, Inc., line of Midnite Mysteries, of which this book is one, can be found by following the link provided.

RICHARD BURKE – The Frightened Pigeon.

Unicorn Mystery Book Club; hardcover reprint, June 1946. First Edition: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1944. Paperback reprint: Dell 204, mapback edition, 1947.

   Back when Victor Berch, Bill Pronzini and I did our annotated bibliography of the Ziff Davis line of Fingerprint Mysteries , we included a short profile of Richard Burke, which of course you should go read. Many of his books, we said, involved a Broadway private detective named Quinny Hite, but as it happens, this is not one of them. In fact The Frightened Pigeon takes the reader to another part of the world and (one imagines) another kind of mystery altogether.

   But first a word on the covers that are shown below, though, before getting down to details. This is, of course, the Dell mapback edition, not either of the other two, and in case you can’t make out the details, the map on the back is that of the city of Marseilles, which is where the last eighty percent of the story takes place.

   The setting of the first fifty pages is Paris, 1942, with the Germans solidly in control of the city. An American dancer named Valerie Bright is still there, however – the pigeon of the title – and very determined to stay non-political. From page 8, of the Unicorn edition:

    “Of course after the Axis had decided to include the United States in the war, she had regarded them as enemies, but there wasn’t anything personal about her feeling.”

   Her close male friend, Charles John Dillon, nicknamed “Ching,” is working closely with the French underground, however, and events, beginning with a stolen German diary, bound to be embarrassing if it falls into the wrong hands – as, for example, into Ching’s hands – soon make the light-hearted Val realize how dirty – and dangerous – war really is, not knowing what will happen next nor whom your friends really are. By page 40, she is one frightened pigeon indeed, as off to Marseilles they and a small group of displaced others go, hoping to find a way out of France and its closed borders.

   The diary appears and disappears with amazing regularity. It is, in fact, amazing, how much mileage an author (Burke) can make of one small important object. Otherwise here is a novel one can learn a large amount from – supposing, that is, that one has never been in a place controlled by Nazi-like enemies one is trying his or her best to avoid – both in term of locale (well-described) and people, especially those like Valerie, whose mind is soon brought down to earth in satisfying (but not very surprising) fashion, but also the large number of others who find themselves caught up in events far beyond their say.

   Don’t get me wrong. This is by no means a major work. It’s no more than ordinary at best, in the overall scheme of things, but what it does have is atmosphere, and plenty of it.

NGAIO MARSH – Spinsters in Jeopardy

St. Martin’s, paperback reprint; 1st printing, November 1998. First edition (UK): Collins Crime Club, 1954. First edition (US): Little, Brown & Co., 1953. Digest paperback: Mercury Press, 1955, as The Bride of Death (abridged). Other paperback reprints: Berkley, 1961, and Jove, 1980, each with several followup printings.

   Among the list of mystery authors who are considered as being among the best at what they did or currently do, Ngaio Marsh is the one I’ve perhaps most neglected. Before reading Spinsters in Jeopardy over these past few evenings, I have to confess that I’d read no more than two of her mystery novels, totaling 32 in all, not a very high percentage. In all 32 of her mysteries was Inspector (later Superintendent) Roderick Alleyn, whose career at Scotland Yard lasted from 1934 (A Man Lay Dead) to 1982 (Light Thickens), quite a long time in anyone’s book.

   This particular edition, the one recently published by St. Martin’s, was part of quite a publishing feat, and they should be commended for it. Back in the late 90s, St. Martin’s put out all 32 novels with uniform covers and in chronological order. (If only someone would do they same for other authors I (or you) could think of, but as far as I’m concerned, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books come to mind first, now that Bantam seems to have let them drop.)

   But to return to Ngaio Marsh and me, I don’t know why it is that I’ve not read her work any more often than I have. I’ve read a lot of Agatha Christie, for example, and Marsh seems to have been Christie with personality, someone may have said, or if they didn’t, maybe they should have. For me, Marsh has been one of those authors whose work has always been available, so perhaps there hasn’t been any urgency in picking one of her books up to read.

   Unfortunately, Spinsters in Jeopardy wasn’t the first one I should have picked up to read in quite a while, since I don’t believe that it’s in any way typical of Marsh’s other mysteries. It’s a thriller, first of all, and not a detective story, even though Inspector Alleyn is in it, and so’s his wife, the former Agatha Troy, the famous artist he’d met and wooed in previous adventures, along with their precocious six-year-old son Ricky.

   All three are in France, in part on a vacation trip to meet Troy’s cousin, whom she’s never met; and in part business, as Alleyn has been assigned an undercover liaison job with the French authorities trying to crack down on a narcotics gang operating in the very same area.

   A bad idea — using his family as cover on a criminal assignment, that is. Alleyn is required to assist on an emrgency appendectomy operation for a woman who had been on the same train they were on, in the heart of the enemy’s strong stronghold, the Château de la Chévre d’Argent. Ricky is kidnapped and luckily found, but a book in which not only drugs but a vicious religio-erotic racket is the central focus is probably not a book for a young lad to be in anyway.

   Ngaio Marsh does manage to make the scenes in which Ricky appears as light-hearted as possible, mitigating against that particular discomfort, but the rest of the occult-based plot, with its mystical (and apparently) deadly rituals, is not one that’s designed to lead to any sense of ease on the reader’s part. Not that there’s anything wrong with mystical rituals, of course, but there didn’t seem to be any need to witness them as far as Alleyn does, which is to nearly their conclusion. Not in a detective mystery, which once again I remind you, this one was not, except at the very end, when it was all but too late.

   As a thriller, there are simply too many coincidences to contemplate, and the villains, as successful as they are, are simply too dumb to survive, especially once Alleyn’s ire is fully aroused and he’s well on their trail. All in all, although not without some interest, this is not one of Marsh’s best books, I’m sure.

   Posted this morning on Reading the Past, my daughter’s historical fiction blog, is some sad news, that of the recent death of Karen Swee, the author of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Murder (Bridge Works, 2004), a historical mystery taking place in New Jersey during the American Revolution.

   From the back cover: “Karen Swee, whose ancestors fought in the American Revolution, lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, across the Raritan River from New Brunswick, where her novel is set. She is a former psychotherapist who grew up in Chicago then moved to Seattle, where she was educated at the University of Washington. She has also lived in Iowa, Toronto, Mexico, and Nova Scotia.”

   Also from the back cover, describing the book: “During the winter of 1777, tavernmistress Abigail Lawrence discovers the body of an overnight guest pinned to the floor with an upright sword. She must find the killer before the occupying British army uses the murder as an excuse to take over her Raritan tavern in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Against a backdrop of wartime tension and hardship, Abigail unravels a puzzle that involves stolen diplomatic papers, captivating spies and avaricious traitors.”

   The book received high praise from Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and more in the series were expected, but apparently this is not to be.

   Go first to Reading the Past for more, then to her obituary in the Newark Star-Ledger.

VICTORIA LAURIE – Crime Seen.

Obsidian; paperback original. First printing, September 2007.

   This is the 5th in this series of “Psychic Eye” mysteries, all featuring Abby Cooper, a professional psychic who dabbles in solving mysteries. For the record, here’s the list:

      Psychic Eye Mysteries:

1. Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye (Signet, December 2004)
2. Better Read Than Dead (Signet, June 2005)
3. A Vision of Murder (Signet, December 2005)
4. Killer Insight (Signet, September 2006)
5. Crime Seen (Obsidian, September 2007)
6. Death Perception (Obsidian, September 2008)

   … a list of mysteries written by Victoria Laurie which has recently been expanded by a new series of …

      Ghost Hunter Mysteries:

1. What’s a Ghoul to Do? (Signet, April 2007)
2. Demons Are a Ghoul’s Best Friend (Signet, March 2008)

   … in which M. J. Holliday and her partner Gilley are, as advertised, ghostbusters who also come across mysteries to solve in the course of their daily routine.

   I suppose I sound slightly dismissive there, and if I did, I probably meant it, just a little. Psychic detectives have been around a long time — since the days of Weird Tales and Seabury Quinn’s detective Jules de Grandin, and probably even before that.

   The fact is, in spite of what you may have seen or heard about on TV, according to Wikipedia, “no psychic detective has ever been praised or given official recognition by the F.B.I. or US national news for solving a crime, preventing a crime, or finding a kidnap victim or corpse.”

   And another fact is — or is this just my opinion? — solving crimes by psychic means takes all of the fun out of solving mystery puzzlers. Well, OK. It’s just my opinion.

   What Abby Cooper has the ability to do is to wave her hand over her FBI boy friend’s “closed case” files, get pictures from them in her mind and give him hints as to who the culprit is or how he got away with it. Or she can accompany her PI girl friend to interview suspects and give her a kick under the table when she know the suspect is lying.

   In Crime Seen she helps Dutch — that’s her boy friend — catch Dutch’s new partner’s former partner’s killer. Or rather, what she’s asked to do is to help prevent the confessed killer from getting parole. In doing so, she risks her life at least once, when a enemy Hummer runs her and her PI friend Candice off the road into a deep ravine.

   And she doesn’t tell Dutch. There are some issues involved. Go figure. The characters are otherwise pleasant enough, and the psychic abilities just unreliable enough, that the book is easy and — in spite of my statement above — fun to read. Just don’t take it too seriously, and my own personal pre-judgments aside, you’ll see why this is a popular series that’s doing well.

   The news of mystery writer Arthur Lyons’s unexpected death appeared quickly on the mystery blogs today. First to report was Jiro Kimura’s The Gumshoe Site, followed up soon after by Jeff Pierce at The Rap Sheet, with a long and personal homage to Mr. Lyons. The latter died on March 21st of complications from pneumonia and a stroke; he was only 62.

   Arthur Lyons’s primary character, the one who appeared in all the novels he wrote on his alone and not as part of a twosome, was a LA-based private eye named Jacob Asch. Borrowing Kevin Burton Smith’s words:

    “JACOB ASCH was a glib, cynical, half-Jewish reporter for the L.A. Chronicle until he got sent to jail for refusing to reveal a source. He did six months on a contempt of court beef, and when he was sprung, the glamour of journalism, for some reason, had lost its appeal for him. So now he’s a glib, cynical, half-Jewish LA private dick who gets involved in some very nasty murders, instead.”

   From an interview that Jeff Pierce did with Arthur Lyons some time ago, here’s the author’s take on his character:

    “You’ll never find Asch doing anything unlikely. He will not usually find stuff through coincidence. He’s a plodder. That’s what private detection is, going through papers. All of Asch’s cases come out of paper. He works with paper more than he does people, whereas in Ross Macdonald and with most of those guys, they do it with information people tell them. But there aren’t too many people out there who are going to spill their guts to an investigator, unless the guy has a handle on what’s going on.”

    Here’s a complete list of Arthur Lyons’s work, at least in printed form. Taken and expanded upon from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, I’ve been able to find covers from all but one of the Jacob Asch books. I apologize that it’s a mixture of hardcovers and paperbacks, nor have I made note of the various reprint editions in which his books have appeared.

LYONS, ARTHUR (Jr.) (1946-2008)

* The Dead Are Discreet (n.) Mason/Charter 1974 [Jacob Asch; Los Angeles, CA]

* All God’s Children (n.) Mason/Charter 1975 [Jacob Asch; Los Angeles, CA]

* The Killing Floor (n.) Mason/Charter 1976 [Jacob Asch; Los Angeles, CA]

* Dead Ringer (n.) Mason/Charter 1977 [Jacob Asch]

* Castles Burning (n.) Holt 1980 [Jacob Asch; Los Angeles, CA]

* Hard Trade (n.) Holt 1981 [Jacob Asch; Los Angeles, CA]

* At the Hands of Another (n.) Holt 1983 [Jacob Asch; California]

* Three with a Bullet (n.) Holt 1985 [Jacob Asch; Los Angeles, CA; Idaho]

* Fast Fade (n.) Mysterious Press 1987 [Jacob Asch; California]

* Unnatural Causes [with Thomas T. Noguchi, M.D.] (n.) Putnam 1988 [Los Angeles, CA; Dr. Eric Parker]

* Other People’s Money (n.) Mysterious Press 1989 [Jacob Asch; Los Angeles, CA]

* Physical Evidence [with Thomas T. Noguchi, M.D.] (n.) Putnam 1990 [Los Angeles, CA; Dr. Eric Parker]

* False Pretenses (n.) Mysterious Press 1994 [Jacob Asch; Los Angeles, CA]

Films:

       Slow Burn, based on Castles Burning. Starring Eric Roberts as Jacob Asch.

Non fiction:

       The Second Coming: Satanism in America (1970)
       Satan Wants You: The Cult of Devil Worship in America (1971)
       The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime (1991) (with Marcello Truzzi)
       Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir (2000)

[UPDATE] 03-26-08. For an insightful essay by Jeff Pierce on both Lyons and Jacob Asch, may I suggest a return visit to The Rap Sheet. It was written in 1981 or thereabouts, but its age does not diminish the timeliness of this followup post in any way whatsoever.

NORMAN DANIELS – The Deadly Ride.

Lancer; paperback reprint, no date stated but stated elsewhere to be 1968. Original title: The Marshal of Winter Gap, as by Peter Grady (Avalon Books, hc, 1962); paperback reprint: Airmont Books, 1963.

   I’m not too sure of the date for the hardcover edition, which I found online in several places, since the copyright date given in this Lancer edition is 1963. A trifling matter, I suppose, and I guess it ought to bother me more than it does.

   Nor have I done much research into the western fiction that Norman Daniels wrote. I found two more he did as by Peter Grady, but his overall output – hundreds of books, mostly mysteries, but romances too, including gothics as by Dorothy Daniels – is too large for me to start sorting out which is which right now. Suffice it to say, I’m sure, Daniels could write anything that someone paid him to do, beginning in the era of the pulp magazines, and for the most part he made it come it out right and professionally done.

   This western at hand is a perfect example of that. It’s slight and in the beginning a not very promising story of a rancher who used to be a gunman, emphasis on the “used to be,” especially now that he has a nine-year-old son.

   But when his wife is killed by a stray bullet in the lawless town of Winter Gap, he’s sorely tempted to revert to his old ways, which doesn’t quite do. Prodded on, though, by the urging of Louise Amister, whose father was the last marshal the town ever had, what he does do is appoint himself town marshal, daring any of the rougher elements in town to tell him no.

   Characterization is slim – I’ve outlined about 80% of it already – but there’s just enough here, along with a surprise or two, and a semi-sappy, soapy sort of ending, to make for a couple of hours of reading and a story that’s surprisingly hard to put down.

   I spent part of this afternoon annotating the following authors’ entries in Part 25 of the online Addenda to Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Looking over the list after I was done, the only connecting feature these authors have in common is that they are in this blog post, and nothing else at all.

LEITE, GEORGE THURSTON. 1920-1985. Joint pseudonym with Jody Scott, 1923-2007: Scott Thurston, qq.v. Under this pen name the co-author of one crime novel included in the (Revised) Crime Fiction IV. Owner of Daliel’s Bookstore in Berkeley, editor of Circle Magazine, and a long-time publisher.

RICH, A(RTHUR) T. [Show byline thus.] Author of one detective novel included in the (Revised) Crime Fiction IV. See below.
      The Curate Finds the Corpse. Bear Hudson, UK, pb, 1945. Setting: England.

SCOTT, AMANDA. Add as a new author entry. Pseudonym of Lynne Scott-Drennan, 1944- , q.v. Under this pen name, the author of some 40 romance novels, many of them Regencies. The titles below appear to have at least marginal crime content.
      -The Bawdy Bride. Pinnacle, pb, 1996. Setting: England, 1800s. [Who is responsible for the mysterious events at Lord St. Ledgers’s ancestral estate – including the suspicious death of his brother, the duke?]
      -Dangerous Angels. Pinnacle, 1997. Setting: England, 1829. SC: Lady Letitia Deverill, in a non-leading role.

      -Dangerous Lady. Zebra, pb, 1999. Setting: London, 1800s. SC: Lady Letitia Deverill. [Letty discovers a plot to assassinate the Queen Victoria.]

SCOTT, JODY. 1923-2007. Add year of death. Full name: Jody Hugelot Scott Wood. Born Joann Margaret Huguelet. “Mr. Scott came later closely followed by Mr. Wood.” Joint pseudonym with George Thurston Leite: Thurston Scott, qq.v. Under her own name, the author of two sf/fantasy novels, Passing for Human and I, Vampire.

SCOTT, THURSTON. Joint pseudonym of George Thurston Leite & Jody Scott, 1923-2007, qq.v. Correct full name of the latter to Jody Huguelet Scott Wood, q.v., and add year of death. Under this pen name the author of one crime novel included in the (Revised) Crime Fiction IV. See below.
      Cure It with Honey. Harper & Bros., hc, 1951. Setting: California. Also published as: I’ll Get Mine (Popular Library, 1952). [Confirm this later retitling.]
      _I’ll Get Mine. Popular Library, pb, 1952. See: Cure It with Honey (Harper, 1951). “She loved men, money and marijuana.”

SCOTT-DRENNAN, LYNNE. 1944- . Pseudonym: Amanda Scott, q.v. Born and currently living in California, prolific writer of romance fiction, under both her own name and her pen name.

WOOD, JODY HUGUELET SCOTT. See Jody Scott.

WADE MILLER – Killer’s Choice.

Signet 771; paperback reprint. First printing, February 1950. Second printing, Signet 1235, 1955. Fourth printing, 1961. Originally published as Devil on Two Sticks by Farrar, Straus & Co., Inc. Appeared earlier in Famous Detective magazine, November 1949. Trade paperback: Stark House, June 2008 (paired with The Killer, Gold Medal, 1951).

   In case you were wondering, I have no information about the third Signet printing. It may have been a Canadian printing. But between 1961, when the fourth printing appeared, and the forthcoming edition from Stark House, that’s over 45 years that the book was out of print. (At least it’s coming back. There are many, many books that are over 45 years old and will never see print again, and I don’t mean only hardboiled novels like Killer’s Choice.)

   If you’d like to read more about the writing pair of Robert Wade and Bill Miller, then I can send you to no better place than the original Mystery*File website, where you can find an overview of their career, many reviews of their work, a partial bibliography, and an interview with Mr. Wade conducted by Ed Lynskey back in 2004.

   Killer’s Choice (or Devil on Two Sticks, if you prefer) is not one of Wade Miller’s stories of private eye Max Thursday, which I can highly recommend to you, if you are a private eye fan, and even if you’re not. It’s instead a tough, hard-as-nails story of a mobster named Steve Beck, or rather a head mobster’s right hand man, or enforcer, if you will.

   The setting is San Diego, and when word gets to Beck’s boss, a fellow by the name of Pat Garland, that the state Attorney General’s office in Sacramento has a direct line into his operations, it’s Beck’s job to find the insider and plug the leak, and fast. It’s like a detective story in reverse, with a list of suspects from which to pick the Good Guy, not the other way around.

   Complicating matters is that Beck is falling in love with the daughter of one of his possible choices, a lawyer by the name of Everett. Marcy is slim, young and not as sophisticated as she thinks she is, and a far cry from Beck’s usual taste in women. One more problem: Marcy seems to favor one of Beck’s other suspects more than she does him. Jealousy is an ugly monster.

   There is at least one additional surprise in store for the reader, which I won’t even begin to hint at, other than what I’ve just said. Surprisingly, though, and not the surprise I just alluded to, is that there is not a lot of action in this novel of the rackets. A lot of talk – a lot of threats, some subtle, some not – most of it very intelligent, and you have to read every word behind what everyone says, if you know what I mean.

   I was reminded more of Dashiell Hammett more than I was Raymond Chandler while reading Killer’s Choice. Robert Wade mentions both as influences in the Lynskey interview, along with Alfred Hitchcock, and I can see the latter as well. The book would have made a terrific movie back around 1950, and in the right hands, it still would today.

   But I mention Hammett in the following sense. We follow the story’s progress through Steve Beck, although he does not tell the story himself. We know what he says and what we sees, but we do not always know what he’s thinking, and for a hoodlum, he thinks a lot. And it also turns out that he’s not quite as capable as he has always led himself to believe, and it comes as quite a shock when he discovers this – especially to him.

   It’s also, believe it or not, a fair play story of detective novel also, or very nearly so. The clues are there when you look back, but even so, they’re still rather subtle, and it’s no wonder I missed them the first time around. (I kick myself like this rather often, you understand.)

   As I hope I’ve made clear, this is not your usual Mike Hammer kind of yarn, to pick a rather obvious author to use in comparison, but at the time the books of both of them came out, I think Wade Miller’s books did respectably well in the competition, and deservedly so. It’s good to see this one coming out again, there’s no doubt about that.

   Richard Wright (1908-1960) was perhaps the best-known and most written-about black novelist of the 20th century, but as far as I know no one except myself has ever pointed out the debt he owes to Cornell Woolrich. During the late Thirties when Wright was working on his first and finest novel, Native Son (1940), he is known to have been a voracious reader of the pulp mystery magazines like Black Mask to which Woolrich contributed dozens of stories.

   Native Son’s basic storyline of a young man wrongly accused of murder and running headlong through “streets dark with something more than night” was clearly inspired by Woolrich’s powerful suspense thriller “Dusk to Dawn” (Black Mask, December 1937; collected in Nightwebs, 1971).

   During the last months of his life Wright was working on another crime novel, recently published in unfinished form as A Father’s Law, and it seems equally clear that here too he took his point of departure from Woolrich. In “Charlie Won’t Be Home Tonight” (Dime Detective, July 1939; collected in Eyes That Watch You, 1952) a middle-aged cop slowly becomes convinced that the criminal he’s seeking is his son. Woolrich’s cop of course is white. A Father’s Law deals with a middle-aged black cop who also becomes convinced that his son is a criminal.

   If this is simply a double coincidence, it’s one that even Woolrich (who was prone to stretch coincidence to the outer limits) would have rejected. Any student of African-American literature who’s in need of an unexplored topic could do worse than to investigate the Woolrich-Wright interface in depth.

   Silly mistakes in mystery fiction are not confined to nonentities like John B. Ethan, whose fond delusion that Zen Buddha was a person I discussed in my last column. Some of the biggest names have perpetrated howlers no less ridiculous.

   Take, for instance, Margery Allingham. “The Definite Article” (The Strand, October 1937; collected in Mr. Campion and Others, 1950) finds Albert Campion called in by his friend Superintendent Oates when Scotland Yard is asked by the “Federal Police” of the U.S. (by which I presume she means the FBI) to arrest and deport a “society blackmailer” whose extortion drove a young woman in New York to suicide.

   Excuse me? Where’s the Federal crime? Where’s the Federal jurisdiction? Any doubts that Allingham knew nothing about the American legal system should be allayed a little further in the story when Campion asks Oates why the Feds got in touch with Scotland Yard instead of, say, “the Sheriff of Nevada.” Since when do states have sheriffs?

   Richard Fleischer (1916-2006) directed some of the worst big-budget movies ever to issue from Hollywood but started out helming several excellent little specimens of film noir, perhaps the best known being The Narrow Margin (1952) and Violent Saturday (1955).

   His memoir Just Tell Me When to Cry (1993) says very little about most of his noirs but includes a neat anecdote about a similar film he had nothing to do with. In 1946, as a novice at RKO, he sat in on a production meeting with tough-as-nails executive producer Sid Rogell and the well-known theatrical director Harold Clurman, who was helming his first movie. Fleischer doesn’t name the picture but, since Clurman made only one movie in his life, it has to be Deadline at Dawn, loosely based on Cornell Woolrich’s novel of the same name.

   As Fleischer remembered the meeting, the first thing Rogell told Clurman was: “You don’t have forty days to shoot the picture. You’ve got thirty.” Then Rogell picked up the script, noticed that the first scene took place at night and called for rain (in film noir, what else?) and asked Clurman: “Rain? You know how much fucking rain costs?….What do you want rain for?” “For the mood,” Clurman told him. “Fuck the mood. No rain.”

   Rogell was about to order Clurman to cut back on the number of people who appeared in the scene when the director interrupted: “How about dust? Lots of dust blowing everywhere. Can we afford dust?”

   In the finished film the first scene takes place indoors – the confrontation between the blind pianist (Marvin Miller) and his predatory ex (Lola Lane) – and neither rain nor dust appears in the second scene, which is set outdoors but was clearly shot on a soundstage.

   So many people have told me that I absolutely must see Infernal Affairs (2002), the Hong Kong movie which Martin Scorsese remade with Leonardo di Caprio and Matt Damon as The Departed, that I finally did it earlier this month.

   The Asian film tells the same story as its U.S. counterpart – the duel between two moles, one planted in the mob years ago by the PD, the other planted in the PD by the mob – but much more tightly and cynically and without the graphic in-your-face violence that seems to have become a Scorsese trademark.

If    you’ve hesitated because you’re unfamiliar with Asian action films and are afraid you won’t be able to tell the characters apart, I can assure you that this is not a problem. The wispy-mustached police mole in the mob (Tony Leung) could never be confused with the clean-shaven mob mole on the force (Andy Lau), and the only cop whose knows his mole’s identity (Anthony Wong) could no more be mistaken for the only mobster who knows his mole’s identity (Eric Tsang) than could Martin Sheen for Jack Nicholson in Scorsese’s version.

   I do recommend, however, that Infernal Affairs be seen in letterbox. The panned-and-scanned version I got from Netflix eliminates far too much of each image from an intensely visual film – and one that goes far towards proving that noir has become a universal language.