THE INVISIBLES “Pilot” (Season 1, Episode 1). 01 May 2008. BBC, 60 min. Anthony Head, Warren Clarke, Dean Lennox Kelly, Jenny Agutter, Mina Anwar, Paul Barber, Emily Head, Darren Tighe. Creator/screenplay: William Ivory. Director: William Sinclair.

   The Invisibles was a short-lived British comedy-mystery series that consisted of six episodes and was never renewed. The episodes do not seem to have titles, so I’m calling this first one the pilot.

   And as the pilot it does a first rate job of establishing the characters and setting extremely well. Maurice Riley (Anthony Head) and Syd Woolsey (Warren Clarke) are two of three members of a gang of burglars, who retired when the third of them died. They were called “The Invisibles” by the press due to the fact that in all of the years they were in working together, they were never caught.

   Now some 15 years later, bored to death of easy living, the two remaining members find themselves in need to go back to work. Syd’s son is in a jam, moneywise, and against Maurice’s wife’s strict orders, back to their black-clothed clandestine activities they go.

   Things do not go well at first. Their skills are rusty, and security devices have been updated greatly during their years of retirement. But along the way their path leads them to the third member’s son (or he finds them), and at the end of the first episode they are ready to tackle the world in full gear again.

   Even in this first episode the two main characters have great chemistry together. It is as if they really were two mates who have known each other for a long time. The humor in that is raised by both their camaraderie and their struggles to get themselves in shape to work again is largely quiet and unforced, but none the less effective for all that.

   The complete series is available both on DVD and streaming on Acorn TV.

GEORGE P. PELECANOS – Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go. Nick Stefanos #3. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1995. Back Bay Books, trade paperback,July 2011.

   I started the last Stefanos book, Shoedog, but couldn’t get into it and gave up. I’d forgotten why, though, so I gave this one a shot because of the title.

   Nick Stefanos is a PI and pat-time bartender in Washington, DC, He’s an alcoholic, too. One night he ends up down by the river at the end of M Street, passed out in the weeds. He comes to early the next morning,just enough and in time to hear a black man and a white man execute someone, who turns out to be a young black man.

   It’s not something he can forget or let alone, and he begins a journey that ends with more death, and leaves a trail of empty bottles and shattered lies.

   A few things come quickly about this one. First, it’s a great title. Second, I don’t like “heroes” who are as generally screwed up in the head as Stefanos is. Third, Pelecanos writes a mean, effective, dark brand of prose.

   All of which says, I guess, that he is a very good writer, but I don’t like what and who he writes about. I got awfully tit=red of the gulp-by-gulp, bottle-by-bottle accounts of Stefanos’s drinking, and of his repeated pissing in the street.

   I never had much of a taste for noir fiction, and if this isn’t that, it’s close. Nasty stuff, well done, and I think I’ll pass on the next course, thank you very much.

      The Nick Stefanos series —

A Firing Offens.St. Martin’s 1992.
Nick’s Trip.St. Martin’s 1993.
Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go. St. Martin’s 1995.
The Big Blowdown. St. Martin’s 1996. (*)
King Suckerman. Little 1997. (*)
The Sweet Forever (1998) (*)
Shame the Devil. Dennis McMillan 1999.
Soul Circus (2003) (*)
Hard Revolution (2004) (*)

   (*) May be only cameo appearances.

SEAN CHERCOVER – Big City Bad Blood. Ray Dudgeon #1. William Morrow, hardcover, January 2007. Harper, paperback, March 2008.

   The big city that the title of this first novel refers to is Chicago, and in it, just doing his job, PI Ray Dudgeon finds himself up against the Outfit — or better stated, caught in the crosshairs between two factions of the same.

   His client is a mild-mannered locations scout from Hollywood, who seems to have stumbled across a rental scam that so far has cost the lives of several of the inhabitants of a building he was looking at. His life threatened, want he needs to do is have Dudgeon act as his door-to-studio bodyguard.

   And Ray is more than tough enough to handle the job, but then again he doesn’t know ahead of time what he’s up against. Parts of this book are as brutal and hardboiled as they come, and deciding to stay with the case anyway, Ray also manages to lose the love of his life.

   I enjoyed the book, but as in most cases in which a PI is hired as a bodyguard, there is next to no detective work involved. I really don’t care for books in which the primary subject matter consists of gangsters, the Mob, or hoodlums in general, but if you do, then you may like this book even more than I did. (I also am no big fan of police procedurals any more, either. Fair is fair, I’d say.)

            —

Bibliograhic Notes:   Awards and award nominations for this book:

2008 Shamus Award for Best First Novel
Finalist 2008 Anthony Award for Best First Novel
Finalist 2008 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel
Finalist 2008 Barry Award for Best First Novel
Finalist 2008 Thriller Award for Best First Novel

   There has been one followup novel in the series, that being Trigger City (2008), and several novelettes and short stories which either Dudgeon has appeared or some of the people he knows have lead roles in.

THOMAS CHASTAIN – Vital Statistics. J. T. Spanner #2. Times Books, hardcover, 1977. No paperback edition.

   Relatively few private eye novels appear any moe, and those that do often seem to have their existence pend soley on minor variations from the standard format. This one’s told in present tense, for example, but one soon learns to ignore that. The only other distinguishable feature is that J. T. Spanner’s office help consists of his two ex-wives, with both of whom he maintains most cordial relations.

   The case itself concerns a missing stewardess and the mutilated body of an unidentified young woman. Are they the same? The underlying background and mood are provided by the living entity called New York City, the provider as well of a myriad interesting facts and figures.

   Although nothing new really develops, it is a smooth and convincing effort, the only jarring moment coming with a distastefully violent means of forcing a final confession.

Bibliographic Notes: Spanner’s earlier case was entitled Spanner (Mason/Charter, 1977). There was not a third. Among his other crime novels, Chastain wrote five books about Max Kauffman, a Deputy Chief Inspector of the N.Y.P.D, including an appearance in the first Spanner book, and two additional cases for Perry Mason, written after the passing of Erle Stanley Gardner.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN – Bone in the Throat. Villard, hardcover, 1995. Bloomsbury, paperback, 2000.

   Bourdain is Chef at one of Manhattan’s “hotter-than-hot” new dining spots, and this is his first novel. I sort of expeted another cozy food book and almost skipped it. Turned out it wasn’t, though.

   Tommy Pagano isn’t one of the Boys, but he’s related to them. He’s sous chef at a restaurant in Little Italy controlled by his uncle Solly the Wig, who definitely is one of the Boys. Not one of the big boys, and not too highly thought of, but one of them. The Feds are after Solly and his boss, Charley Wagons, and they’re watching and turning everybody in sight.

   The owner of he restaurant is wearing a wire and trying to keep everybody happy. Tommy gets dragged into the mess when he’s made an unwilling witness to some bad business by his uncle, and his dreams of becoming a big-time chef give way to nightmares about being a small-time con. Or maybe even a no-time-left corpse.

   This was not a cozy, or even a “humorous” look at mob life. It’s got sort of a wry tone and a couple of the characters were a little exaggerated, but it would take a pretty odd sense of humor to call it funny.

   The cooking background is interesting and not overdone, and Tommy Pagano is both a realistic and likable character. I don’t know anything about the Mafia, but these hoods seemed pretty genuine. Bourdain tells a good story with crisp dialog and well-drawn, if mostly sleazy characters, and I liked this.

K. K. BECK – Young Mrs. Cavendish and the Kaiser’s Men. Walker, hardcover, 1987. Ivy, paperback reprint, April 1989.

   The year is 1916, and the US is not yet in World War I. What the Germans hope to do is make sure we don’t, and somehow a lonely spot in the Arizona desert is an important part of their plans. And, although they don’t know it, so is Maude Teasdale Cavendish.

   She’s 29, divorced, and an ambitious society reporter for the San Francisco Globe. What she uncovers begins a rousing Rover Boys type adventure, with the addition of two spunky, forward-looking heroines [the other being young debutante Louise Arbour, a whiz at driving her very own motor car, and who kidnappers mistake Mrs. Cavendish for, early on in the story], back when most women still had “delicate constitutions.”

UPDATE:   I only vaguely remember this one, but my review of it makes it sound as though I’d enjoy reading it again. I do remember thinking I’d like to read another of Mrs. Cavendish’s adventures, but alas, it didn’t happen.

JAMAICA INN. Mayflower Pictures, UK, 1939. Paramount, US, 1939. Charles Laughton (also co-prodcuer), Leslie Banks, Maureen O’Hara, Robert Newton, Marie Ney, Horace Hodge. Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier. Director: Alfred Hitchcock.

   I recently had the chance to watch the 75th Anniversary 4K restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn on the Cohen Media Channel. And you know what? I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a lovingly crafted, atmospheric thriller that moves along at a steady clip, immerses you in a cinematic landscape of danger, and propels you into a seedy, sweaty, windswept world filled with thieves and cutthroats.

   Adapted to the big screen from Daphne du Maurier’s eponymous 1936 novel, Jamaica Inn hinges on Charles Laughton’s lead performance as Sir Humphrey Pengallan, a dissolute local official who moonlights as the ringleader of a group of marauders.

   Upon his orders, innkeeper Joss Merlyn (Leslie Banks) and his gang of lowlifes deliberately wreck ships off the Cornish coast, then looting the goods aboard and murdering any survivors. It’s apparently a lucrative operation for Pengallan, a bloviating drunkard who has built quite a life for himself in the far southwestern corner of England.

   All that changes when Joss’s niece, Mary Yellen (Maureen O’Hara in her first major screen role), shows up at the Jamaica Inn. She has come from Ireland and has no place to stay apart from with her aunt. It doesn’t take long for the seemingly innocent Mary to realize that something sinister is afoot.

   After accidentally witnessing Joss and his men’s attempt to hang Jem Trehearne (Robert Newton) for betraying their gang, she becomes caught up in a whirlwind of deceit and mortal danger. By her side is Treherane, who turns out to be something more than a mere criminal.

   What makes Jamaica Inn so enjoyable to watch is not merely the exceptional performances from the cast – notably Laughton’s scenery chewing villainy – but also the ways in which Hitchcock utilizes the still nascent medium of film to portray a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere. Throughout the movie, one gets the sense of how entrapped all of the characters – heroes and villains – alike feel.

   The heroes know that danger is all around them. The criminals know they know they can only outrun the law for so long. Much as in in Notorious (1946), which I reviewed here, Hitchcock places great emphasis on how various objects – a rope designed for hanging, a knife uses to set someone free from captivity, a musket, a lantern – are integral to the plot.

   It is my understanding – and correct me that I am wrong – that Hitchcock himself later on did not think highly of his film and that the critics at the time were not especially keen on it. But no matter. It remains an elegantly crafted film, subdued in tone, without a lot of fanfare. Kudos to the Cohen Film Collection for restoring this classic. I plan to rewatch it again sometime in the years ahead.

THE PROTECTORS. “2,000 Ft to Die.” Incorporated Television Company (ITC), UK. 29 September 1972 (Episode 1, Season 1). 30min. Robert Vaughn (Harry Rule), Nyree Dawn Porter (Contessa Caroline di Contini), Tony Anholt (Paul Buchet). Guest Cast: Harvey Hall. Co-prodcuers: Gerry Anderson & Reg Hill. Screenplay: Terence Feeley. Director: John Hough .

   The Protectors were a somewhat informal group of European jet set private eyes who often got together to solve cases too tough to handle on their own, each having their individual specialties. They were Harry Rule (London), Contessa Caroline di Contini (Italy), and Paul Buchet (Paris).

    The year 1972 was rather late in the history of television for action adventure shows such as this one to have only 30 minutes of running time. The first episode, “2,000 Ft to Die,” would maybe make sense if it were twice the length, but it didn’t, and it doesn’t.

   It has something to do with a scientist who is the last of five working on a project to create srtifical gold who is still alive, and he calls in The Protectors for help. It doesn’t stop him from doing a stunt for some moviemakers consisting of jumping out of an airplane with a supposedly faulty parachute. Whoever it is who wants him dead makes sure that it really is faulty.

   You can’t make a coherent TV show consisting only of good-looking people, glamorous party scenes, and colorful camera shots and lots of action. That’s all I saw in this one, I’m sorry to say. The show did last for 52 episodes running over two season, so maybe I’m wrong. I don’t think it caught on in this country.

GERRY BOYLE – Port City Crossfire. Brandon Blake #3. ePublishing Works, paperback, August 2019. Setting: Portland Maine.

First Sentence: Mid-September, not quite fall but the Maine summer slipping away.

   It’s every policeman’s nightmare. Officer Brandon Blake becomes involved in a foot chase with a suspect known as Thrasher who is wearing a Go-Pro camera and holding a gun. Blake is forced to shoot, but he forgot to turn on his camera and the suspect’s Go-Pro memory stick is gone. Thatch’s wealthy parents and his girlfriend Amanda are out for Blake’s job and his freedom. But being suspended doesn’t stop Brandon from following his instincts as he finds the high-school diary of Danni Moulton which leads him into danger from her boyfriend Clutch.

   This is a first chapter that really works. You meet the principal characters, learn a bit about their life, and, true to the life of a cop, go from low intensity to very high intensity in the blink of an eye realizing just how a bad situation can happen and the reaction afterward. Boyle makes it real and painful.

   One quickly becomes aware of why Boyle’s writing is so good. It’s refreshing to have a police officer who isn’t hardened and cynical, who feels the impact of their action, who doesn’t shrug and walk away but has a very human reaction including self-doubt. And the victim’s parents: Boyle knows how to depict raw emotion.

   Brandon does get himself into situations. An excellent description of him is given–“I know your type, my friend. Once you get on to something, you don’t let go. You ride it into the ground even if you do down with it.”

   All of Boyle’s characters are effective. Kat, Brandon’s partner is a good, strong character and an excellent balance to Brandon as she sees through him and doesn’t pull any punches. His personal partner, Mia, is someone one may particularly come to like. And then there’s Matthew Estusa, the classic gotcha’-style reporter who’ll do whatever it takes for a story is certainly someone who is recognizable.

   Twists and threads: the plot twists are very well done and effective; sometimes shocking. “Friggin’ A, Blake, … Is there anything you don’t wind up in the middle of?” The number of threads counts up to where one finds oneself thinking ‘here is another thread to pull.’

   As the threads begin to weave together, the danger and suspense increase. The plot did seem over-complicated, a twist that was a bit too convenient and a move that, especially for a cop, crept into the realm of being a bit TSTL (too stupid to live). However, those were small things and were easily forgiven in light of there being a great climax and an excellent line toward the end.

   Although the book is listed as A Brandon Black Mystery, Book 1, that’s not strictly accurate as this is the third book in the series following Port City Shakedown and Port City Black and White, both published by Down East Books. It’s worth going back to the beginning.

   Port City Crossfire is a well-done police procedural. It has a tone different from others one might read, and a protagonist who is both complex and compelling. Boyle walks more on the noir side of the street, but in a very restrained way. There is something rather addictive about his writing.

Rating: Good Plus.

       The Brandon Blake series —

Port City Shakedown (2009)
Port City Black and White (2011)
Port City Crossfire (2019)
Port City Rat Trap (2020)

   Something like four years separate the first three of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder novels from the next two. The fourth in the series, A STAB IN THE DARK (Arbor House, 1981), begins as usual in Scudder’s favorite bar-restaurant, where he’s approached by Mr. London, a prosperous insurance exec with an unusual problem.

   Nine years ago his daughter had been the sixth of eight victims of a psycho killer known as the Icepick Prowler. Recently the perp has been caught and confessed to having slaughtered all the women—except Number Six, for whose murder he has an unshakable alibi.

   As chance would have it, Scudder had been briefly involved with that crime back in his cop days. Now he’s offered a sizable fee to reopen the old case and try to track down the copycat who committed the one ice-pick murder the Prowler didn’t.

   Even in the earliest Scudder novels Block tended to reduce plot to a bare minimum and concentrate on relationships, the sense of the city, and characters, first and foremost of course that of Scudder with his alcohol problem. These tendencies continue in A STAB IN THE DARK, which is a bit longer than any of the earlier Scudders so that many readers might expect more in the way of plot complications.

   What they get is fewer. Fueled by frequent pit stops for bourbon, our unlicensed PI proceeds methodically through various Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods. Almost halfway through the novel he describes his method, which is reminiscent of Simenon’s Maigret: “You gather details and soak up impressions, and then the answer pops into your mind out of nowhere.”

   There’s no violence along the way except yet another encounter with a teen-age mugger which, like the similar encounter in THE SINS OF THE FATHERS, has nothing to do with the plot.

   This time however, it’s connected with two of the book’s themes. One is the decline and fall of the city. A madman known as the Slasher has been carving up passersby on First Avenue. A 13-year-old boy has recently shot two women behind their ears. There’s been an upturn in muggings. “It’s wonderful how the quality of urban life keeps getting better.”

   The other is the effect of drinking on Scudder’s reactions to a violent situation. These elements create a context for the scene which didn’t exist in THE SINS OF THE FATHERS. Ultimately Scudder finds the ice-pick killer’s imitator, whose motive for murder takes a lot of believing although it helps us understand why this time there’s no question of private vengeance.

   Block manages to integrate the single violent episode in the novel with one of its main themes, but as far as I can tell he fails to do so with an episode of a radically different nature. In the midst of his investigation Scudder becomes involved with an alcoholic woman who’s been going to AA meetings. During one of their conversations she quotes the last six lines of Dylan Thomas’ “A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London.” I’ll limit myself to the first and last lines of the six.

   Scudder is oddly moved by the lines: “There’s a door in there somewhere if I could just find the handle to it.” Later he visits a bookstore and finds the complete poem. “I read it all the way through….There were parts I didn’t think I understood, but I liked the sound of them anyway, the weight and shape of the words….”

   The subject never comes up again. Except for the obvious connection that the woman whose murderer he’s seeking is the daughter of a man named London, I can’t find the ghost of a link between “A Refusal to Mourn” and this novel. To hunt for one, you need only google Thomas’ name and the title of his poem.

   Another theme Block hints at but doesn’t pursue has to do with legal ethics. Relatively late in the novel, Scudder gets in touch with the attorney assigned to defend the genuine Icepick Prowler.

   It’s almost as if Block had foreseen Martin Scorsese’s version of CAPE FEAR (1991), which takes off from the premise that a lawyer (Nick Nolte) assigned to defend a sadistic rapist (Robert De Niro) threw the case because he knew what a menace his client was.

   Many law professors had something to say about that movie and most of them took the position that Nolte’s character was a Judas, a traitor to the legal system. My own take can be found in Chapter 8 of my book JUDGES & JUSTICE & LAWYERS & LAW (2014). I do wish Block had had more to say on this issue.

   He does have more to say about his protagonist. Scudder still lives in the same bleak hotel room, still tithes, still drops into churches at odd moments: “I didn’t say any prayers. I never do.” He continues to dip into that Lives of the Saints book we’ve seen in earlier novels. “The martyrs held a curious fascination for me. They’d found such a rich variety of ways of dying.”

   But clearly he’s drinking more than ever, to the point where we live through a blackout with him. Despite his involvement with a woman who’s trying AA, he doesn’t feel that route is right for him. At the end of the novel he and the woman put their relationship on hold by mutual consent and life goes on.

   EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE (Arbor House, 1982) is the fifth Scudder novel and at least twice as long as most of the previous four. At the time, Block seriously considered ending the series with this one. As he explained to interviewer Ernie Bulow, “Although each of the five books is a novel, complete in itself, it seemed to me as though they constituted one five-volume novel, and that had come to an end….” (78)

   Scudder is hired by a top-tier call girl who wants to break with her pimp and start life over but is afraid he’ll retaliate by having her disfigured or killed and brings in Matt as her go-between. The pimp, a cultivated black Vietnam veteran known as Chance, who lives in a converted firehouse and has a connoisseur’s taste in coffee and African art, assures Scudder that the woman is free to leave him. The call girl takes Scudder to bed as a sort of bonus.

   A few days later she’s found in a luxury hotel on Sixth Avenue in the Sixties, slashed to ribbons with a machete, her face hacked into “an unrecognizable mess.” A Hispanic clerk in the hotel, who may have recognized the slasher when he checked in, or perhaps was just an illegal immigrant fearing the law, mysteriously vanishes and is never found. Chance, the obvious prime suspect, swears he’s innocent and hires Scudder to clear him.

   It’s one of Block’s most powerful springboard situations and, especially in view of the book’s length, one expects an equally powerful plot. Block doesn’t oblige us. Having just reduced plot to a bare minimum in A STAB IN THE DARK, this time he offers us even less. What he concentrates on is Scudder’s worsening problem with liquor, his interactions with various cops and lowlifes and the other women in Chance’s stable, one aspiring to be a poet, another to be an actress, a third flirting with suicide.

   Block wants to paint a realistic picture of late-20th-century New York City, having Scudder read a parade of atrocity stories in the daily newspapers—stories that Block took from life. As he told Bulow, “Every day I would pick up a copy of the Daily News before I got on the subway,…and on the ride I would read about one outrage after another, and those would be the ones that I would specifically mention the next day. The city never failed me. It always supplied something for Scudder to read and remark about.” (89)

   It’s small wonder if we empathize with the drunken rant of stressed-out cop Joe Durkin in Chapter Fourteen which gives the book its title:

   Any reader who imagines Block is thinking only of New York City is quickly corrected by what he told Bulow: “The faults that Scudder sees in the city, I think,…are universal these days. I think the whole country and the whole world is like that.” (55)

   Scudder reads and is told about countless psycho-sadistic incidents, and eventually encounters one as a teen-age black mugger emerges from a Harlem alley and accosts him, clearly intending to both rob and kill him. In this entire long novel’s only brutal onstage sequence, Scudder smashes the kid’s face and breaks both his legs.

   As we’ve seen, there have been similar mugging incidents in previous Scudders that were just as irrelevant to the plots of the books they appear in as this one is, but none were as deliberately sadistic as the one in EIGHT MILLION WAYS. It’s almost as if Block were trying to out-Spillane the Mick.

   About two-thirds of the way through the book comes another slasher murder, the victim this time being a transsexual street whore hacked to death in a sleazy Queens sex-and-porn motel, a crime that at last returns us to the main thread of the plot. After a visit to the Parke Bernet art gallery Scudder channels Maigret, suddenly intuiting the truth without benefit of anything remotely resembling a clue. Then he sets himself up as the next target for the slasher, who appears for exactly three paragraphs and is quickly disposed of in a sequence that is something of a take-off of the shower scene from PSYCHO.

   Didn’t this creep deserve a gruesomely painful end like his spiritual brother in the later Scudder novel A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, or at least something comparable to what the black mugger got earlier in EIGHT MILLION WAYS? The name of the person whose treachery ignited the whole mess is mentioned just a few times, and not only does he never appear onstage but at the novel’s end no one knows if he’s alive or dead.

   Clearly the portrayal of the city was vital to Block in EIGHT MILLION WAYS, but at least equally important was the evolution in Scudder. Every so often he drops in at an AA meeting but, as Block told Bulow, “when it comes his turn to talk, he always says ‘My name’s Matt, I’ll pass.’”

   EIGHT MILLION WAYS ends differently. Eleven days sober and having come within an inch of returning to drink, he again attends an evening meeting at St. Paul’s church in his neighborhood. “I thought about…going back to my hotel….I’d been up two days and a night without a break. Some sleep would do me more good than a meeting I couldn’t pay attention to in the first place.”

   But he stays, and when it’s his turn to speak, “‘My name is Matt,’ I said, ‘and I’m an alcoholic.’” The final words of the book: “And the goddamndest thing happened. I started to cry.” For Block this scene is crucial. “Scudder comes to terms with his alcoholism and goes through catharsis there,” (78) he told Bulow . This explains why he seriously thought about abandoning his protagonist at this point. It’s the good fortune of millions of readers that he changed his mind.

   The most important living writer of private-eye novels at the time EIGHT MILLION WAYS appeared was Ross Macdonald, who died a year later, in 1983. If some of the Lew Archer novels that propelled him to stardom were perhaps too densely plotted, EIGHT MILLION WAYS is clearly their polar opposite.

   Could Block have been trying to create the most plotless PI novel possible? If so, he made it work. EIGHT MILLION WAYS is intensely engrossing from first page to last, and remains for Block himself and for a huge number of his countless readers one of the finest of the whole lengthy Scudder series.

   The 1986 movie of the same name, starring Jeff Bridges and Rosanna Arquette, was the last feature directed by Hal Ashby (1929-1988), who had won a film editing Oscar for IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) and had helmed such hits as HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971) and COMING HOME (1978).

   The script was co-written by the no less distinguished Oliver Stone. The big names didn’t help. LEONARD MALTIN’S MOVIE AND VIDEO GUIDE rightly calls the picture a bomb, with “only faint resemblance to Lawrence Block’s fine novel.” I won’t waste time or words summarizing its plot or detailing how it differs from the book. Masochists who wish to do so may consult Google.

      —

NOTE: All page numbers refer to Lawrence Block & Ernie Bulow’s book of conversations AFTER HOURS (University of New Mexico Press, 1995).