Reviews


Reviewed by TONY BAER:

   

RUSSELL HOBAN – Turtle Diary. Jonathan Cape. UK,hardcover, 1975. Random House, US, hardcover, 1976. Reprinted many times. Film: Rank, UK, 1985, with Glenda Jackson & Ben Kingsley.

   So it’s a sweet and sad little caper novel.

   William’s in his mid-forties. He’s a bookstore clerk. Used to be an ad man. Used to have a wife and kids. But that’s all gone now. He lives alone in a London rooming house. He’s aimless and alone.

   Naera’s also in her forties. She’s written a series of popular children’s books about personified small animals, living in a hovel, drinking tea, daintily and quaint. She also is alone, and suffering writer’s block.

   During their solitary wanderings, they visit the zoo. In the reptile building three full grown sea turtles share a small tank.

   There’s some genetic homing device within the soul of a sea turtle, beckoning them to breed on some faraway island to which they’ve never been. But somehow, they know the way. And will go there, danger and distance be damned.

   To Naera and William it suddenly seems of the utmost importance that these sea turtles be released to the sea to achieve their predestined teleology.

   Naera and WIlliam finally meet when Naera seeks an obscure sea turtle book at William’s bookstore. And they covertly hatch a plan to kidnap the sea turtles and release them to the sea.

   Which they do. Releasing the sea turtles at the simulated Cornish fishing village of Polperro, formerly a real fishing village, now surviving on tourism and verisimilitude.

   And then they part, William and Naera, released back into the world. With no preprogrammed teleology. To map their way on their own. Without a compass.

   A minor classic.

Reviewed by JONATHAN LEWIS:      

   

WYOMING OUTLAW. Republic Pictures, 1939. John Wayne, Ray Corrigan, Raymond Hatton, Donald Barry, Pamela Blake. Directed by George Sherman.

   The Three Mesquiteers ride again in George Sherman’s Wyoming Outlaw, a surprisingly effective entry in the Republic Pictures series about the three Old West adventurers. John Wayne, just on the cusp of stardom, portrays Stony Brook, the titular leader of the outfit. Ray Corrigan reprises the role of Tucson Smith, while Raymond Hatton plays the third Mesquiteer, Rusty Joslin.

   When the three adventure heroes drive their cattle through dustbowl country, they stumble upon a small town where Joe Balsinger (LeRoy Mason), the local corrupt government boss, is doling out jobs for campaign contributions. Worse still, he’s extremely vindictive and has driven the Parker family into poverty.

   This explains why tempestuous, politically radical Will Parker (Don Barry) has been illegally poaching animals on government land and even went so far as to steal one of the Mesquiteers’s cattle! Circumstances get even rougher and Parker   eventually goes on the lam, hiding out from the sheriff and the Cavalry alike. He becomes the titular Wyoming outlaw with a rifle and a willingness to kill.

   Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. An comparatively early John Wayne movie from Republic? Must be clunky and dated. Let me assure you: it isn’t. Although the story is simple, it’s delivered in a sophisticated manner that isn’t dumbed down for mass consumption or a young audience. There are no silly songs or goofy humor here. With fistfights aplenty and Wayne’s rugged charm, this somewhat downbeat programmer is hard not to like.

REVIEWED BY MIKE NEVINS:

   

RICHARD S. PRATHER – The Amber Effect.  Shell Scott #40. Tor, hardcover, 1986; paperback, 1987.

   The ingredients of today’s private eye fiction are brooding and corruption, mangled relationships and a soiled world. But there was a time when, if you picked up a PI book by one particular writer you’d be grabbed by plot situations wild and woolly as a bighorn ram, by characters straight off the nut tree — including a bevy of nubile bubbleheads sans clothes or sexual inhibitions –and by narrative and dialogue eccentric enough to pop the eyeballs.

   For this particular writer the private eye novel wasn’t a Film Noir in prose, it was a hoot, no more believable or substantial than a comic book but outrageously, bawdily funny while it lasted. His name was Richard S. Prather and his principal character was Shell Scott, a big ex-Marine PI with the white hair cut Camp Lejuene style and the angular eyebrows and the Cad convertible and the tropical fish.

   Scott was the first major private eye whose adventures were published as paperback originals, and roughly 40,000,000 copies of those escapades were sold between his debut in 1950 and the mid-1970s. Then, for reasons too complicated to go into here, Prather shut down his word factory. The good news is that production has started up again — this time in hardcover — and that none of his inspired looniness has been lost.

   Prather plots defy summary. Suffice it to say that The Amber Effect kicks off with Scott finding the doorway of his L.A. apartment graced by an undraped lovely who is both the winner of the Miss Naked California contest and the target of a gaggle of hit men, including a human clam, an ex-Rams linebacker, and a half-senile gun-for-hire known in the trade as One Shot.

   In time Scott finds the connection between the lady and a weirdo scientist who, before he was murdered, invented something potentially worth billions. All trails lead to a pair of unforgettable wacked-out action scenes where. without a gun and assisted only by several three-dimensional holograms of himself, Scott takes on the entire cast of bad guys.

   The Amber Effect isn’t way out there in the stratosphere with alternative classics like Prather’s 1964 The Trojan Hearse, but — insane story-line, juvenile double entendres, Fifties mammary fixations, and all — -it’s a tour de farce of the sort no one in the world but this particular writer could have turned out, and it’s wonderful to have him back at work.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, November/December 1986.
REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

   

A CANTERBURY TALE. Archers, UK, 1944. Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, Dennis Price, and John Sweet. Written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

   A true original, made by England’s premier filmmakers at the height of their genius. A wartime film infused with… well… not so much with patriotism as with a deeply-felt but unspoken love of a country and its people. Plus a hint of romance and a dollop of detection, played to perfection by a cast that radiates charm but never oozes with it.

   What mystery there is concerns a small-town villain known only as The Glue Man, who stalks young girls out late at night, sneaks up on them in the dark (this was the time of blitzkrieg and blackouts) and pours glue in their hair.

   Sounds like very little to hang a movie on, and in fact the filmmakers tip the audience off early on as to the identity of the sticky miscreant. And while the cast goes through the motions of detection and pursuit, the movie itself dawdles innocently on the quiet charm of simple folk rooted to the soil or uprooted by War.

   The principal roles are wonderfully played, But Powell and Pressburger take as much care over characters whose hour upon the screen is brief indeed — to wonderful effect!

   From a pugnacious Station Man unseen in the dark, to a beefy, pipe-puffing sergeant at a lecture, a garage owner, an organist at a cathedral…. We watch the stars play out the story against a background of characters who seem to be stars of their own movies in some alternative cinematic universe.

   This is, in short, a film you must not miss— Yes You: that guy out there peering at the screen. I’m talking to you, Buddy. Find this movie and watch it!
   

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Thomas Baird

   

DICK FRANCIS – Odds Against. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1965. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1965. Berkley X-1370, US, paperback, 1967. Reprinted many times since.

   In most of his books, Dick Francis uses an ordinary man (usually connected with the racing world) as his protagonist, caught up in events that are so overwhelming and out of control that he must make heroic efforts to sort them out. But in Odds Against, Sid Halley has a job as a detective — the obvious choice for a tough man to right the world’s wrongs.

   He’s been doing the work for two years, and when he’s shot (on page one of the story), he realizes that a bullet in the guts is his first step to liberation from being of “no use to anyone, least of all himself.” He was a champion steeplechase jockey, that’s what makes him tough. A racing accident lost him the use of his hand and self-respect simultaneously.

   The action breaks from the starting gate and blasts over the hurdles of intrigue, menace, and crime. Halley is cadged by his shrewd and loving father-in-law into confronting Howard Kraye, “a full-blown, powerful, dangerous, big time crook.”

   On the track he encounters murder, mayhem, plastic bombs, and torture. But he endures, in some part to regain his self respect, and in some part because he believes in racing, the sport, and in putting it right. A fascinating chase through an empty racecourse defies the villain. In the end, despite his tragedy, Sid Halley sees himself as a detective and as a man.

   Dick Francis was so taken with the characters in this book that he went on to use them in a television series, The Racing Game (shown on Public Broadcasting). A second Sid Halley novel, Whip Hand, won the British Gold Dagger A ward in 1979 and another Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.

———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

       The Sid Halley series

   by Dick Francis

Odds Against (1965)
Whip Hand (1979)
Come to Grief (1995)
Under Orders (2006)

   by Felix Francis

Refusal (2013)
Hands Down (2022)

Reviewed by JONATHAN LEWIS:         

   

FINGER MAN. Allied Artists, 1955. Frank Lovejoy, Forrest Tucker, Peggie Castle, Timothy Carey. Director: Harold D. Schuster.

   Frank Lovejoy stars in Finger Man, a decidedly average 1950s crime film, about a career criminal who gets a chance to go straight – with a catch. After getting nabbed by law enforcement, Casey Martin (Lovejoy) is given a choice: either serve life in prison or collaborate with the Treasury Department to nail bootlegger and syndicate leader Dutch Becker (Forrest Tucker). After seeing what Becker’s goods — presumably heroin — have done to his very own sister, Casey decides that he’ll take the deal and work to bring down Dutch.

   Unfortunately, the movie is slow to get going. It takes a while for the premise of the film to come clearly into focus. Fortunately, however, things do get moving with the introduction of Peggy Castle as Gladys Baker, a former “employee” of Dutch’s who is now Casey’s love interest and Timothy Carey as Lou Terpe, Dutch’s sadistic enforcer. Both characters play a pivotal role in the plot. After the sociopathic Terpe (Carey) kills Gladys (Castle) at the behest of Dutch, all bets are off. Casey no longer wants to bring down Dutch for the cops. He is out for blood.

   As far as the cinematography, there’s nothing especially noir about it. In fact, this black and white movie often feels visually flat. Surely some more style could have been injected into the film to give it more of a shadowy look?

   All told, Finger Man is a gritty little crime film that tells a fairly basic story about a man at the crossroads of his life. It’s got some good parts and solid acting, but it’s not a “must see” by any means. There’s nothing particularly new under the sun here.
   

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Thomas Baird

   

DICK FRANCIS – Blood Sport. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1967. Harper & Row, US, hardcover. 1968. Berkley, US, paperback, 1969. Reprinted many times since.

   From the winning world of British steeplechasing (where he was Champion Jockey in 1954), Dick Francis moved effortlessly into crime fiction with his first novel, Dead Cert, in 1962, and continues to be a front-runner. He has written twenty-some excellent thrillers full of old-fashioned moral polarity with strains of humor. These “adventure stories” (as Francis calls them) have amazing plots of clever evilness and feature nonrecurring heroes familiar with the racing game.

   Flawed, uninvolved, and soulless, each central character finds the value of vulnerability and returns to the land of the living through courage and love. As a central theme, it can be compared to that of the works of Ross Macdonald. As critic John Leonard said, “Not to read Dick Francis because you don’t like horses is like not reading Dostoevsky because you don’t like God.”

   In Blood Sport, death lurks on a simple Sunday sail on the Thames. An American visitor is almost drowned, and his rescuer is convinced that it wasn’t simply an accident. Gene Hawkins, the rescuer and hero, is an English civil servant, a “screener” who checks employees in secret-sensitive government jobs, His training permits him to spot details that make “accidents” phony, and his knowledge of guns and listening devices comes in handy.

   The rescued man asks for help in locating a stolen horse that has just been bought for a huge price. Hawkins is relieved to use his vacation time to hunt for missing horses, because he is despondent, filled with a “fat black slug of depression.” This is the only part of his character that doesn’t ring true-after all, it’s only a failed love affair.

   The pace picks up, and the scene changes to the U.S.A. From the farms of Kentucky, the trail is followed to Jackson, Wyoming. Along the way. Hawkins gets people together for some psychological reconditioning and exposes a bloodline scam as the scene shifts to Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, and Kingman, Arizona. The U.S. tour is fast moving, and Francis docs not dwell on local-color background, especially not to make any points. He just gives the graphic, journalistic details of a place that push the story along.

———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Reviewed by JONATHAN LEWIS:         

   

JUROR #2. Nicholas Hoult, Zoey Deutch, Megan Mieduch, Toni Collette, J. K. Simmons, Kiefer Sutherland. Director: Clint Eastwood.

   Juror #2 starts with a premise and then runs with it to the very end. Magazine writer and recovering alcoholic Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is called for jury duty in Savannah, Georgia. It doesn’t take him long, however, to realize that the defendant, former drug dealer James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso), is most certainly innocent, and that he himself was the accidental perpetrator of the crime in question.

   The state’s official version of events is that Sythe, after a public fight with his girlfriend (Francesca Eastwood), followed her down a dark, rainy two lane highway, bashed her head in, and dumped her in a ditch. What the state doesn’t know is that Kemp, juror number two, accidentally killed the victim that same night, thinking that he had hit a deer with his vehicle.

   That’s the set-up. What follows for the next ninety minutes or so is a taut courtroom drama and thriller that doesn’t waste a minute of your time. The viewer gets to witness not only the jury deliberations, with Kemp trying to bend the jury to his will, but also the contest between an ambitious prosecutor (Toni Collette) and the overworked public defender (Chris Messina), tasked with a thankless job.

   Filling out the cast are J.K. Simmons as a juror who turns out to be a retired police detective from the Midwest who has doubts about the case, Kiefer Sutherland as a lawyer who is also Kemp’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, and Zoey Deutch as Kemp’s pregnant wife who wants to believe that her husband is a good man. All three are excellent in their roles. One only wishes Simmons had a more prominent role. His character simply disappears after a while.

   Overall, a solid, comparatively apolitical work by director Clint Eastwood that doesn’t remotely dumb things down for a mass audience. It’s a mature, sophisticated film that is able to both appeal to both one’s emotions and intellect without being pretentious or preachy. It’s not flashy and there’s not a lot of action, but it’s worth your time.

   

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

   

SIX BLACK HORSES. Universal, 1962. Audie Murphy, Dan Duryea, Joan O’Brien, George Wallace, Roy Barcroft, and Bob Steele. Produced by Gordon Kay. Written by Burt Kennedy, Directed by Harry Keller.

   Sometime in the late 1950s, a producer at Universal figured out how to make a good Audie Murphy Western: Hire a capable character actor to steal the show.

   This resulted in some enjoyable outings, as Audie tangled with Walter Matthau, Barry Sullivan, Stephen McNally, and here Dan Duryea, as a somewhat weathered rogue who saves him from being wrongly hanged, then partners with him escorting an enigmatic woman on a journey across Indian Country (popular terrain in this genre) to join her husband.

   Director Harry Keller was trained up in his craft at Republic, the cradle of the B Western. So was producer Kay for that matter, so the locations are scenic, the action fast, and Duryea’s character is a bit more complex than usual—he sees this job as a welcome respite from his usual vocation as a killer-for-hire, and maybe even a path to redemption—until his past comes crashing down around his ears.

   With so much fine work from producer, director and stars, it’s just a shame that writer Burt Kennedy let us down. Kennedy was doing some promising work about that time, with scripts for Seven Men from Now and Ride Lonesome to his credit, but in this case he simply loots and pillages his best stuff, “borrowing” big chunks of dialogue, characters from his own work, and even a bit of Borden Chase’s script from Bend of the River.

   The result is not so stale as it is unsettling. They say those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but we remember films like The Tall T and Gun the Man Down with genuine affection for their depth of feeling and taut drama. To see their best parts here sliced-and-diced for a quick buck, somehow cheapens our regard for them.

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Kathleen L. Maio

   

GEORGE FOY – Asia Rip. Viking, hardcover, 1964. Pocket, paperback, 1985.

   The highly evocative title of this novel comes from one of the shoal areas off the coast of Cape Cod, an area worked by the rugged men of the North Atlantic fishing industry. George Foy sets his impressive debut mystery among these men and the corrupt individuals on land who control the industry.

   Lars Larsen joins the search for his friend Joe Sciacca when the latter fails to return from a fishing run. Later he is asked to continue to investigate by Sciacca’s widow, Marie. When the pregnant Marie is also murdered, Larsen finds himself with a murder rap on his head, and a need for vengeance in his heart.

   Foy’s well-wrought plot features a lot of bloody action as Larsen traces the link between organized crime and the fishing industry. Much of the action includes feats of unbelievable derring-do by Foy’s hero. Not your average fisherman, he is a former Harvard man and drug-runner. He is also the kind of central character who keeps the reader involved and believing even as he scales the beams and girders of a massive railroad bridge with an injured and infected shoulder.

   George Foy has worked as a journalist covering the fishing industry. This background lends great authenticity to his first mystery/adventure novel. He is also a-fine storyteller.

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

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