R. AUSTIN FREEMAN – The Singing Bone. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1912. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1923. Popular Library, US, paperback, as The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. Reprinted many other times.
The Singing Bone consists of five novelettes, averaging a bit over fifty pages each: “The Case of Oscar Brodski,” “A Case of Premeditation,” “The Echo of a Mutiny,” “A Wastrel’s Romance,” and “The Old Lag.” Though the final story is fairly routine, Freeman broke new ground with the first four and invented the “inverted” detective story.
Each of the tales is told in two parts of about equal length. In part one, “The Mechanism of Crime,” as it is subtitled in the first story, we actually see the crime committed and are furnished with all the facts that could be used in solving it. In part two, “The Mechanism of Detection,” we follow Dr. Thorndyke as he investigates the crime, finds the clues, and finally solves it.
Although the classic question ‘Whodunit?” is necessarily absent for the reader, there is a challenge of a sort to match wits with the detective and spot the clues in advance.
The inverted form has never been popular in fiction, although Freeman used it in three more stories and two novels, and the popular television series “Columbo” did very well by it for several seasons. Perhaps the secret was that Peter Falk’s Sergeant Columbo was a far more interesting character than Dr. John Thorndyke. whose microscopic examinations lack the flair and showmanship of Sherlock Holmes. Still, the stories in The Singing Bone deserve rediscovery, especially “The Echo of a Mutiny,” which is probably the best of them, with its atmospheric setting in a lighthouse.
Dr. Thorndyke was first introduced in the novel The Red Thumb Mark (1907), notable for its first use of fingerprint forgery in detective fiction. The collection John Thorndyke’s Cases (1909) features eight conventional detective stories and is especially noteworthy for “The Blue Sequin” and “The Aluminum Dagger.”
THE HUNTER. Paramount Pictures, 1980. Steve McQueen (Papa Thorson), Eli Wallach, Kathryn Harrold, LeVar Burton, Ben Johnson. Director: Buzz Kulik.
Steve McQueen, in his final movie role, portrays bounty hunter Ralph “Papa” Thorson, a towering real life figure whose unorthodox career choice was the source material for The Hunter. The movie is very much a mix of action, drama, and romance, with plenty of time devoted to Thorson’s relationship with his pregnant girlfriend, Dotty (Kathryn Harrold).
As far as the aforementioned action sequences, they are probably the best part of the film. We get to see McQueen drive a combine harvester while chasing outlaws; fight bare-fisted with a sheriff’s nephew who skipped bail; and chase a vicious killer through Chicago, with a particularly breathtaking scene taking place on a train. Literally.
The glaring problem that The Hunterhas is similar to the flaw found in many biopics. The writers simply don’t choose a good entry point into the story. Here, it takes nearly thirty minutes for the movie to find its legs. There’s a lot of effort devoted to showcasing Thorson’s eccentricities, such as his love of classical music and old vintage toys.
Which is fine. But not as the expense of introducing a primary antagonist early on in the running. (Eventually, there is a primary villain: an ex-con who blames Thorson for being sent away to prison.)
Overall assessment: in many ways, the movie feels more like a TV pilot tasked with introducing a character than a comprehensive feature film with a solid plot. But there’s plenty of good stuff in here too. Eli Wallach being one of them.
ROSS MACDONALD – Sleeping Beauty. Lew Archer #17 (of 18). Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, March 1973. Bantam, paperback; 1st printing thus, May 1974. Reprinted many times since.
One of the later books in the series, and to my mind, not one of the better ones. Archer meets a young woman against a backdrop of a huge oil slick off the southern California coast. She is married but distraught, not only because of the disaster, but the oil company responsible for the damage is owned by her parents and other members of her family.
After he takes her home with him, she leaves with a massive amount of sleeping pills along with her. And then disappears completely. Archer is hired by her husband to help find her, but matters are complicated by a ransom note received by her family. Is it real, or is it a fake? A scheme designed for revenge. For the money? Is she part of her disappearance herself?
This is something that has happened in the past, several years earlier. It is part of her makeup. Part of her history.
The opening is fine. It’s the investigation Archer undertakes that follows this that struggles to match it. The woman has a large, complicated family, and there is a lot of baggage that has accumulated over the years. Archer’s job: to make his way through all the physical and mental debris that has piled up, including murder, questioning everyone as he goes, driving from family member to family member to near exhaustion.
There is not much action. This is adult stuff. It is also a book I had not read until now, but I’m sure if I had read it earlier, a lot of what Archer brings out into the light of day would have been over my head, in terms of having experienced anything similar. I would have been too young. And then there’s this. The back story, as revealed, is not as interesting even now as it should have been. A list of characters and who they are would have helped.
But, and I am still trying to work out how this is true, the story is compelling. There’s plenty of guilt to spread around, and that includes that caused directly by the killer. My greatest wish is that I’d rather have had the killer’s identity come out as something other than an anti-climax.
SHOPWORN. Columbia, 1932. Barbara Stanwyck, Regis Toomey, Zasu Pitts. Director: Nick Grinde.
In this Columbia pre-Code romantic drama, Barbara Stanwyck portrays Kitty Lane, a waitress who falls in love with David Livingston, an upper crust university student (Regis Toomey). The latter’s overbearing mother disapproves, to put it mildly. To separate the lovebirds, her friend, a prominent judge, creates a bogus charge against Kitty, alleging a public morals violation.
That gets Kitty sent to a women’s reformatory. After she gets out, however, she doesn’t return to her humble job at the diner. Instead, she becomes a world famous showgirl. Years later, David (Toomey) shows up at her doorstep. He’s still madly in love with her. But his mother, who now owns a gun, is still adamantly opposed to having Kitty as her daughter-in-law.
Truth be told, there’s not a whole lot to recommend about Shopworn. It’s not that the movie is completely abysmal or anything like that; it’s just rather tedious with a color by numbers type of script that gives the viewer the bare minimum of drama and conflict but nothing more. It’s anemic.
Overall assessment: Stanwyck takes her role seriously, but the overall product remains something of a dud.
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Marcia Muller & Bill Pronzini
R. AUSTIN FREEMAN – Mr. Pottermark’s Oversight. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1930. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1930. Reprinted a number of times, including Dover, US, softcover, 1985.
R. Austin Freeman was one of crime fiction’s true innovators. He developed the “inverted” mystery story to an art; and in Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, he created a series detective of significant capabilities one who has been called “the only convincing scientific investigator” in the genre.
Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke novels and short stories can be said to rival Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon in quality and cleverness of plot. Where Holmes uses deductive methods, Dr. Thorndyke draws on a wealth of scientific knowledge — everything from anatomy to zoology-to solve his cases. And although many of his plots involve technical explanations, Freeman was a master at making science and its jargon explicable to the lay reader.
Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight is Dr. Thorndyke’s most celebrated case. Anthony Boucher called it “a leisurely, a gentle novel, yet an acute one …. No other detective in fiction has ever equaled Thorndyke in the final section of explication, often so tedious in lesser hands. The scene is especially effective in this novel; and the lucid unfolding of the reasoning of John Thorndyke carries that intellectual excitement and stimulus so often attributed to the detective story so rarely found.”
Marcus Pottermack is a gentleman of leisure who spends most of his time studying British mollusca (snails) in his garden. As the novel opens, he has realized his dream of purchasing a sundial for the garden, and in preparing the site where he intends to place it, he uncovers an old well. The discovery proves fortuitous; Mr. Pottermack receives a visit from a gambler named Lewson, who has been blackmailing him.
It seems Pottermack is in reality Jeffrey Brandon, a runaway convict who is supposed dead. Lewson has had financial reverses, and once again he puts the bite on “Jeff.” Pottermack lures Lewson into the garden, has a fight with him, and Lcwson falls, hitting his head on the edge of the well before tumbling in. Mr. Pottermack then sets about covering up his crime.
The main problem is footsteps leading to his house in the soft earth. He can’t obliterate them, and so he decides to continue them on, past his home. There is a problem, though: Lewson’s shoes are on him in the well.
The resourceful Mr. Pottermack decides to manufacture shoes, taking a plaster cast of the footprints and reproducing their soles. He then walks some distance in them, creating the impression that the person passed on by. Of course, there are other details to be dealt with, and Mr. Pottermack takes further steps (no pun intended) to assure his crime will never come to light. But he hasn’t counted on John Thorndyke’s scientific methods — methods that eventually reveal Mr. Pottermack’s oversight.
Readers who enjoy the inverted detective story and/or a good intellectual puzzle will find this an absorbing novel.
STAR OF MIDNIGHT. RKO Radio Pictures. William Powell, Ginger Rogers, Paul Kelly, Gene Lockhart. Director: Stephen Roberts.
In this case a suave lawyer must both solve a murder and find a missing leading lady. He’s aided in this by his determined young girl friend, who is equally determined to make the relationship permanent.
The plot is complicated, but the result is not much of a detective story, when it comes down to it. Powell, who is his usual urbane self, finds the killer, but only in cooperation with a police lieutenant whose aching feet nearly steal the show.
SEPTEMBER 5. Republic Pictures, 2024. Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch. Director: Tim Fehlbaum.
September 5 is a different kind of movie. First of all, it’s a new drama/thriller with a running time of around ninety minutes or so – a rarity these days. Second, it’s a fully immersive experience, with the viewer plunged into the action as if he were there, standing on the side and watching everything transpire.
Finally, it’s different because it tells a familiar story – that of the 1972 Munich Olympics kidnapping and massacre of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian group, Black September – from the vantage point of the ABC Sports crew covering the events live and as they unfolded.
As the film recounts, this was the first time in television history that a terrorist attack was broadcast live to the world, with some 800 million people watching.
Peter Sarsgaard portrays ABC Sports President Roone Arledge who, along with colleagues Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), are forced to make split second decisions on if, and how, to broadcast the ongoing terrorist attack in real time without being exploitative.
Realizing that this is a huge story, Arledge plays hardball with CBS to ensure that ABC Sports has access to the shared satellite feed. Mason, for his part, has to run the control room in a manner that gets the story out quickly without sacrificing accuracy. There’s a lot of interoffice drama, intrigue, and tension among the crew, all of whom seem to be wrestling with uncomfortable questions without easy answers.
Overall, September 5is quite an achievement and it’s no surprise that the original screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.
One complaint however: a good portion of the movie seems (deliberately) poorly lit. I get that the filmmakers were trying to recreate as close as possible what it looked like in the ABC Sports control room, but a little more illumination would have helped immensely and wouldn’t have detracted from the claustrophobic atmosphere.
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Thomas Baird & George Kelley
NICOLAS FREELING – The Back of the North Wind. Viking, hardcover, 1983. Penguin, paperback, 1984.
The crime novels of Nicolas Freeling follow the giant footsteps of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret. But the more you read of Freeling, the more you realize that they follow not in but alongside those footsteps, sometimes wandering to explore at greater depth character and social relevance.
Freeling writes of ordinary, unexciting policemen — Dutch police inspector Piet Van der Valk, and Inspector Henri Castang of the French National Police — who have a private eye’s conscience. He presents sympathetic character studies of all the players in each of his dramas, and his detectives examine all aspects of the various crimes they are investigating, whether broad or narrow in scope.
Freeling, who was born in London and presently lives in France, began writing romans policiers in 1962 with Love in Amsterdam and followed it with nine more books featuring Van der Valk; then, in Aupres de ma Blonde ( 1972), he committed the rather shocking act of doing away with his series detective because he had grown tired of him and wanted to experiment with other types of stories and protagonists.
Van der Valk’s widow, Arlette, finds his murderer and concludes that particular case, among much social commentary and existential thought. She appears in two other books of her own (The Widow, 1979; Arlette, 1981) — perhaps not so successfully: at least one critic felt that widows should “wear black and smoke cigars … instead of solving crimes.”
In 1974 Frceling published the first of his novels about Henri Castang, Dressing of Diamond. In contrast to Van der Valk, the veteran Castang (thirty years with the French police) possesses a sense of humor and a more dynamic wife, Vera, who is fond of quoting Conrad. Castang’s relationship with his wife is a nice counterpoint to the grim realities of the murder cases he is confronted with especially the central case in The Back of the North Wind.
Returning from vacation, Castang investigates the particularly heinous murder of a young woman. In a boggy part of a nature reserve in the French countryside, a forester discovers a plastic carrier bag containing a rotting mass of human flesh. A search is organized and six other plastic carrier bags are found, each containing a part of a human body.
Lab analysis reveals the murder victim to have been a female of North European origin, approximately twenty years old. The dismembered parts also show human bite marks: Castang is evidently faced with a murderer who is also a cannibal.
His investigation is complicated by other pressing matters: a series of killings of ordinary citizens beaten over the head with a heavy weapon; a very strange and sinister prostitute; and political corruption within Castang’s own department. Each of the interwoven plot lines is untangled neatly through procedural and psychological methods, and the result is a grim but absorbing novel packed with Gallic atmosphere.
The Henri Castang series ranks with Freeling’s Van der Valk novels and with the Martin Beck series written by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo as the best of the European police procedurals. Other recommended titles are The Bugles Blowing (1976) and Castang’s City (1980).
PICKUP ALLEY. Columbia Pictures, 1957. Victor Mature, Anita Ekberg, Trevor Howard, Bonar Colleano. Directed by John Gilling.
Victor Mature portrays Charles Sturgis, a federal narcotics agent tasked with bringing down the enigmatic Frank McNally (Trevor Howard), a man also responsible for the death of his sister. Sturgis travels widely – there are a lot of shots of planes taking off and landing – in order to bring McNally to heel.
There are a couple of subplots, but essentially the gist of the film is about a federal agent seeking to bring a devious international criminal to justice. Sounds compelling enough, right?
Let me be blunt. For an international thriller, Pickup Alley aka Interpolis remarkably unadventurous. Dull, even. Part of this is Mature’s fault. But the script doesn’t help, either. Sure, you have the on location shots of Lisbon, Rome, Athens, and other cities.
And then you’ve also got Anita Ekberg as a drug courier tasked with moving heroin from city to city. That must count for something too, right? Sadly, no.
When all is said and done, this British crime film punches well below its weight and remains a case of ‘what might have been’ had the producers used the locations more to their benefit.
Overall assessment: a structurally sound film with a not particularly captivating story about the international narcotics trade.
PROFESSIONAL SOLDIER. 20th Century Fox, 1935. Victor McLaglen, Freddie Bartholomew, Gloria Stuart, Michael Whalen, C. Henry Gordon Based on the story “Gentlemen, the King,” by Damon Runyon. Directed by Tay Garnett.
Well done mix of adventure, sentiment, and comedy finds ex-Marine Colonel Michael Donovan (Victor McLaglen) at the nadir of his career as a soldier of fortune around the world, from Siam to Nicaragua, playing bodyguard to American playboy George Foster (Michael Whalen) in Paris. After rescuing Foster from his own profligate ways in a comic Paris night club brawl, Donovan dumps the unconscious playboy at their hotel room, where two men show up with a proposition.
It seems one of those comic opera kingdoms so popular in the era in the Ruritania/Graustark mode need Donovan to kidnap their popular king so they can carry off their revolution (“We are not Bolsheviks or National Socialists…”) and then return the king to his throne once the crooks who have control of the country are gone. Donovan is a little disappointed he won’t be leading the army in the revolution, or at least assassinating the king, but the money offered is $50,000 and even covers hospitalization.
So we are off to the comic opera land of castles and intrigue where Donovan and Foster kidnap the monarch only to discover his majesty King Peter II is a child (Freddie Bartholomew). Forced to also kidnap Countess Sonia (Gloria Stuart), who Foster flirted with at a costume ball they attended to get the lay of the land, they successfully make off with the King while Gino (C. Henry Gordon), leader of the military junta that holds power, desperately seeks them.
As you might guess from Damon Runyon’s name in the credits Donovan and Foster were originally a pair of Chicago gangsters in the story, and the screenplay refers to that with King Peter initially thinks they are just that, and that Donovan might be Dillinger. Peter is absolutely thrilled at the idea of being kidnapped and having an adventure rather than the dull old life of a king, even a young one.
This would make an interesting double feature with My Pal The King, in which cowboy Tom Mix and his traveling Wild West show help King Mickey Rooney stay in power in yet another Ruriatanian setting.
There are no surprises here. Donovan is crazy about the kid who proves game (he calls the boy “Campaigner” and the boy calls him “Soldier”) and Foster and Countess Sonia fall in love. The bloodless revolution succeeds, and everything seems to be going fine until a camp of Romany peoples camped near the place they are hiding Peter inform Gino of their whereabouts, and in short order McLaglen and Foster are captured, imprisoned and ordered to be executed despite the King proclaiming they are to be freed.
Before being captured Donovan and Peter make a cross country escape trying to reach the palace and the leaders of the Revolution.
It seems the King recognizes that the revolution was right and should be in power and plans to support it, and Gino can’t have that so he plans to execute the King by firing squad and blame the two Americans for his death.
Luckily Sonia learns of the plan in time to free Donovan, but can he take on two hundred and fifty armed men with just Foster’s help until help can arrive?
Well, maybe, because all along he has been telling some pretty tall tales about doing something just like that wielding an 88 pound Maxim machine gun in his arms (“You have to understand Irish-Americans can do some pretty uncanny things when they’re riled…”), and while no one quite believes him, including Peter, it’s the only chance King Peter has.
Fast-paced and running under eighty minutes the film is handsomely decked out with costume balls, castles, and chalets in the mountains, while Tay Garnett keeps a tight hand on the reigns and McLaglen, the screenplay by Gene Fowler is snappy and finds a nice balance between the disparate elements of action, comedy, and sentiment, and McLaglen and Bartholomew have real chemistry together. Whether that was real or forced it works and is enough that the scenes between them are funny and charming rather than grating and annoying, and that is the difference between a film like this working or not.
It plays like Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, and Popular (one half expects Hope’s Rudolf Rassendayl, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barney Custer, and Joseph Louis Vance’s Terence O’Rourke to show up).
Granted it also has about as much logic and realism as those too, but it makes up for that by never pretending for a minute to be anything than a rousing story well told, a tall tale for grown-ups.
Tears are kept to a minimum and while there are a few misty eyes before the ending, they are appropriate to the rousing finale which ends as all good Ruritanian romances should. amid trumpets, fanfare, and in this case the Marine Hymn.
