LIZ CODY – Monkey Wrench. Eva Wylie #2. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1995; paperback, 1996.

   I was never a fan of Cody’s Anna Lee stories, but Bucket Nut, the first of the Eva Wylie book struck me as fresh, very readable, and even a bit poignant.

   Eva Wylie, aka Bucket Nut and the London Assassin, hasn’t changed much. She’s still a wrestling villain, still guards a junk yard, still the occasional job for Anna Lee. And she’s still big, not too bright, a board or two shy of a stack at times, and independent as a greased pig on ice.

   Her latest troubles stat when an old mate from her younger street days comes to her for help after her sister, a prostitute, has been beaten to death. The mate wants Eva to teach a bunch of other prostitutes self-defense, and somewhere along the way help her find who killed her sister, and do for him. Eva doesn’t want any part of it, but life never has paid a lot of attention to what Eva wants. Nor does it now.

   Eva Wylie is one of the best-conceived and beautifully drawn characters n modern crime fiction. Cody does a marvelous job of sustaining a voice and view that can’t be easy, and are unique. Eva lives a gritty life in a dingy world, and fights through every day as if it were her own private war.

   These aren’t pretty stories, and they aren’t about pretty people. It would be easy to play the characters for laughs, perhaps as easy for tears, but Cody does neither. She simply lets Eva come to life for us, and lets you think what you will. What I think is that in a genre filled with look-and-sound-alikes, Eva Wylie stands out like a pearl in a dungheap. Cody should win awards for these. They aren’t stories everyone will like, but some will like them a lot.

      The Eva Wylie series –

1. Bucket Nut (1992)
2. Monkey Wrench (1994)
3. Musclebound (1997)

Note: This series followed six in Cody’s Anna Lee series.

RADIOLAND MURDERS. Universal, 1994. Brian Benben, Mary Stuart Masterson, Ned Beatty, Scott Michael Campbell, Jeffrey Tambor, Stephen Tobolowsky, Michael Lerner, Anita Morris, and too many comic supporting players to name. Check IMDb. Screenplay by Willard Huyck, from a story by George Lucas. Directed by Mel Smith.

   A Financial flop for Universal and Lucasfilms (but I kinda like it), this looks like His Girl Friday layered over Murder at the Vanities, transposed to a glittery world of Technicolor Art Deco.

   At the maiden broadcast of a new Radio Network, the owner (Ned Beatty) throws a lavish gala for prospective affiliates and sponsors while an unknown killer methodically murders various executives, announcing each killing in advance with a menacing bit of doggerel over the speakers. Meanwhile the staff hustles frantically to keep things running, scriptwriter Brian Benben struggles to keep his wife (Mary Stuart Masterson) from leaving him, and the various “talents” involved contend with scriptless dramas, dropped cues and a temperamental revolving stage.

    Radioland never achieves the bawdy gaudiness of Vanities or the cinematic chemistry of Friday, but what it lacks in charisma it makes up in chaos. Brian Benben spends the whole film dangling from ledges or racing down hallways, chased by cops and/or sponsors, and often in a variety of disguises keyed to whatever musical number is up next.

   These musical numbers are a treat in themselves as bandleader Michael McKean re-jiggers his troupe to look like a panoply of Big Bands, from Xavier Cugat to Spike Jones, with stops along the way for dead-on recreations of the Andrews Sisters, young Frank Sinatra, and even Cab Calloway, all done so well I wished we could have stayed with them longer.

   But it ain’t so. Radioland keeps moving too fast for more than summary scraps of classic hits—though it does pause a bit longer for the ersatz Spike Jones insanity. Less happily, the Writer’s Room at the studio bubbles over with brilliant comics, none of whom get to do anything funny. Disappointing and wasteful.

   So it’s a measure of the movie’s energy that I forgave this mortal sin. Indeed, I barely noticed it. In the scheme of things, Radioland Murders doesn’t amount to much and never will. But it’s definitely a worthwhile time-waster.

PROJECT GUTENBERG. Hong Kong/China. 2018. Originally released as Mo Seung [“unique”]; in Chinese: ç„¡é›™. Chow Yun-Fat, Aaron Kwok, Zhang Jingchu, Catherine Chow, Wenjuan Feng. Written and directed by Felix Chong.

   Lee Man (Aaron Kwok) is an artist suspected of being involved with the legendary counterfeiter The Painter (Chow Yun-Fat) in jail in Thailand. Transferred to Hong Kong to help in the investigation of Inspector Ho (Catherine Chow) into the Painter, the nervous and timid artist recalls his tumultuous history with the master counterfeiter.

   Told in a non-linear style, the film jumps back and forth showing how Lee failed in his career as an artist after going straight having started out as a counterfeiter, how he was estranged from his artist wife Yuen (Zhang Jingchu), and met the charismatic and brilliant Painter.

   Playing brilliantly on audience expectations of Chow Yun-Fat’s past films, the Painter is handsome, brilliant, a one-man army, and as Lee soon discovers to his distress, a ruthless, violent, and volatile criminal with international ties and a plan to counterfeit American dollars that is unprecedented in its ambition.

   Stylish set pieces, like a holdup of a special armored car carrying the inks used in printing dollars, shootouts in the style of John Woo, and an explosive gun battle with a greedy military leader wanting to buy the counterfeiting process Painter and Lee have created, punctuate the film, while the complex mix of characters and Chow Yun-Fat’s increasingly violent and inhuman behavior keep the viewer watching.

   And if all was going on was a story about the young artist being seduced by and eventually turning against the older smoother criminal who turns out to hide a monster beneath the cool exterior and about the cops closing in on them, this would be a well done action crime drama.

   But something more is going on with Project Gutenberg, and it becomes clear toward the end when almost everything you have seen before, an unreliable point of view character, and one shocking twist after another elevate this to something quite different than what you have been watching, or think you have been watching.

   Aaron Kwok and Zhang Jingchu are attractive leads, but the film works because of the viewers’ expectations and knowledge of Chow Yun-Fat’s film history as the charismatic gangster hero with the magic guns and charmed life. The whole movie turns on the viewer’s expectation that this is a different movie than it actually turns out to be, and that is what makes it work.

   It does drag a bit here and there, and some are going to hate the fact it has subtitles.

   But while this is no Usual Suspects (might as well mention it, everyone is thinking it), it does take a fairly standard story of a young man seduced into crime by an older more charismatic figure who proves to have feet of clay, and turn it on its head at every point while providing thrills and spills and then ripping the rug out from under the viewer repeatedly until he is beaten into admiring submission.

   Yes, unreliable point of view characters are kind of cheating, but only if the movie doesn’t deliver, and this one mostly does, right up to the shocking finale when the Painter gets his comeuppance.

   I warn you though, you may kick yourself a bit for having been taken in emotionally as well as by the clever plot twists or hate the movie for leaving you rugless on a cold bare floor when the credits roll.

  RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON – The Lasko Tangent. Christopher Paget #1. W. W. Norton, hardcover, 1979. Ballantine, paperbark, 1980.

   Yes, it sounds like a spy thriller, the paperback reprint is packaged as a spy thriller, but what this book precisely is not is — aw, you guessed it. It’s not a spy thriller.

   What it really is is a novel about the dirty business of laundering money. That is to say, it’s a detective story, and told in today’s most au courant Washington (DC) style.

   Lasko is the President’s favorite industrialist, but his background has more shade than Forest Lawn — not that anyone has ever proved anything. The President, who is unnamed, but — well, let’s just say that only the names have been changed.

   Christopher Kenyon Paget is a lawyer for the Prosecution Bureau of the United States Economic Crime Commission. (And I’ll wager you didn’t even know there was one.) He’s young, idealistic, very much a crusader for what he believes in. A chance tip about some possible stock manipulation takes him to Boston, where he watches in horror as his witness, who works for Lasko, is run down by a hit-and-run driver. Higher things are cooking.

   This is a cynical novel, Patterson’s first, and you don’t have to dig very far to discover it. According to inside the front cover, the author worked for the special prosecutor in the Watergate uncover-up, and his is the voice of authenticity. Paget continually has to fight pressure from higherups, without ever knowing who or where the enemy is. an he has a narrow escape or two before he does.

   On the other hand, none of this “real Washington” stuff is really new, and it’s all wrapped up in the end more tightly than real life ever seems to be.

       The Christopher Paget series —

1. The Lasko Tangent (1979).    [Winner of Edgar award for Best First Novel, 1980.]
2. Degree of Guilt (1992)
3. Eyes of a Child (1994)
4. Conviction (2005)

GOLIATH “Of Mice and Men.” Amazon Prime, streaming. 14 October 2016 (Season 1, episode 1). Billy Bob Thornton, William Hurt, Maria Bello, Nina Arianda and a large additional ensemble cast. Creators: David E. Kelley & Jonathan Shapiro. Director: Lawrence Trilling.

   One of the unexpected benefits of obtaining my first Kindle and finding out how to use it was accidentally signing up for Amazon Prime. Since the first 30 days are free, I decided why not and started looking around to see what TV series might be available.

   I don’t know why I happened to pick this one, but I’ve just watched the first episode on my large screen computer monitor (I have an even large TV screen, but it’s a smart TV, and it’s way smarter than I am), and all in all it was a good choice. Good enough that I’m planning on finishing up the story, another seven episodes. I reserve the right to bail out, though, if the story line goes off in directions too funky for me to stay with it.

   Which, on the basis of one episode, I don’t think it will. There’s nothing basically new in what I’ve seen already. A burned out lawyer named Billy McBride (Billy Bob Thornton), and I mean down and out, is reduced to piddling jobs that he couldn’t care less about, but when he’s offered one that might give him a chance to get back at his old firm, he jumps at it.

   A death at sea has been chalked up to suicide — by a man blowing up both himself and the boat he’s borrowed in an explosive fireball of flame — may be the key to his revenge. The man’s wife has already settled with the insurance company, but his sister. now two years later, still thinks there’s something that needs explaining.

   Complicating matters is that Billy’s ex-wife is high in the hierarchy at the law firm involved, the same law firm that still has his name on the door. There are several other characters involved, including, in no particular order, Billy’s daughter; a lady co-partner in the lawsuit he initiates who is basically a real agent in the Valley; and a legal assistant who is basically a hooker who owes Billy Bob a favor; and so on.

   Enough threads, in other words, to keep the story going for the full season, and then some, but here are a couple of things that annoyed me. The prologue is poorly done. That there were two boats, not just one, out on the water when the explosion happened was not at all clear — one that blew up, the other with two witnesses.

   And while I’m no expert on what it is that women see in men, and while perhaps some women may succumb quickly to the attractive features of whoever Billy Bob Thornton may play, I found the possibility that Billy and his new client hop into bed together, no more than ten minutes of their first meeting, rather far-fetched.

   Otherwise, at this point of my viewing status, all is OK. The first episode ends with Billy is a local jail, imprisoned on trumped-up charges of some totally bogus driving protocol. That this happens on the first day he is to be in court does not seem to be coincidental. But from here, as they say, to be continued.

DENNIS WHEATLEY – The Haunting of Toby Jugg. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1948. Bantam, US, paperback, 1972. Several paperback editions have been published. TV film: BBC Four, UK, as The Haunted Airman, with Robert Pattinson as Toby Jugg.

   I wuz had.

   I mean there I was, all alone in the Big city and looking for some Halloween reading. I’d heard of Dennis Wheatley, and the cover of the Arrow paperback suckered me in good & proper. Then too, the story seemed pretty good at first, if a little long at 352 pages. So I settled myself in for a chilling tale of things Satanic, little suspecting….

   Haunting is one of those books written as a series of journal entries, here by the eponymous Toby Jugg, an RAF flyer (this is set in 1943) recovering from war wounds that left him unable to walk. He’s also the heir to several million pounds and an industrial empire, due to inherit when he turns twenty-one in a few weeks, and he’s convalescing in one of the family castles, far from the madding bombs – and contact with society—under the watchful eye of Helmuth, a trusted family friend.

   And oh yes: as the story opens there’s a giant spider outside his window trying to get in.

   Wheatley sets this up capably, with Toby giving updates on the spider’s appearances and the reactions of Helmuth and the staff specially hired to look after him. We very quickly come to suspect he’s being gaslighted, and I won’t be giving anything away to say that he is—but there’s more to it than that. Something implacably evil has plans for Toby that go well beyond giant spiders at the window.

   With all that going for it, >Haunting coulda been a contender. Only it ain’t.

   The chief problem is Wheatley’s repetitive plotting. Time and again Toby comes up with a plan to thwart his persecutors, gets things rolling, comes close to success but… but we still have all those pages to fill so his efforts get frustrated with metronomic regularity. Once or twice I could have handled this, but after the fourth or fifth failure, and 200+ pages to go, I began to wonder if someone was trying to drive both of us mad.

   Another thing: Maybe it sounds inconsistent to accept giant spiders and Satanic curses, then gripe about the story being unrealistic, but when Toby masters the art of Hypnotism and bends the unwilling and unsuspecting to his will just by eye contact, I felt like Wheatley must be kidding us. And when he forcibly hypnotizes someone by wrestling them to the ground and holding their eyes open, I devoutly wished he were kidding. Only he ain’t.

   There’s also a strong current of Anti-Semitism here. “Anti-Semitism” is a term that gets entirely too much play these days, but Wheatley’s story posits that Jews, having killed Christ, will think small potatoes of serving Satan, turning Communist, bringing down the Government, and ushering in a Satanocracy. There’s even a racial slur, when Toby observes that a character with a tinge of Jewish blood can’t properly wear the clothes of an English Squire. Readers of vintage fiction like this should be prepared to overlook the attitudes of a different time, particularly toward minorities, but this taxed my tolerance for intolerance.

   But I hung on to the end, buoyed, I must admit, by Wheatley’s gift for tension. And as the odds stacked up against Toby, and he worked even harder to plot an escape, I became emotionally invested in just how he would do it.

   Came the dawn, and I realized what a fool I had been. Betrayed again by a smooth line and my own weakness, I finally got to the dramatic climax and found it the most blatantly stage-managed bit of deus ex machina claptrap I have ever read. I — literally, and without exaggeration — flung it across the room and regretted the squander of my precious youth on such drivel.

   Steve, should I tell them about it? I’ll let you decide. We can either end it here with me waving readers away from this thing, or insert a SPOILER ALERT! And go on. In either case, they have been warned!

   Surrounded by Satanists and menaced by a spider the size of a St Bernard, Toby Prays to God for help. And God answers. Suddenly Toby can walk again. And he has some mystical power that disintegrates the Spider. The Satanists are momentarily cowed by this display of Holy capabilities, but they rally to a counter-attack, driven on by their own greed and fear of demonic retribution. And just at that moment, another inmate who has been tunneling out in secret, hits the lake on the estate, and water gushes in, drowning the godless and sparing our hero.

   For this I came three hundred and fifty pages??

DONALD ZOCHERT – Another Weeping Woman. Nick Caine #1. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1980. No paperback edition.

   It took longer than it should have, but it finally came t me. What the first few chapters of this book read like is what the old radio program Pat Novak, for Hire sounded like. Maybe you remember it. Jack Webb played the title role, a tough, world-weary man-for-all-jobs kind of guy who keeps finding himself in a peck of trouble, mostly of the murder variety.

   The narrator of this tale is named Nick Caine, a man whose background is never completely revealed, but that’s the sort of person he is, and that’s the kind of tough, taciturn story he stumbles into.

   As you read it, you’ll find it mellowing somewhat, into the laid-back, weather-beaten and melancholy mode thathas recently epitomized Rocky Mountain mystery fiction. The scene flickers incessantly back an forth between Denver and the wilderness country of Montana, save for one brief interlude taking place in one of the all-white fortresses that find themselves surrounded by the no-man’s land of urban Chicago.

   It all begins with a dead girl, a girl shot before a grizzly got to her, a girl dead before the bullet reached her brain. Nick Caine picks up the search for her killer, and all he finds are memories, a mother’s heartbreaks, and a continuing sequence of death by violence. Caine has been drifting for a year or more before being persuaded into taking the case. He has been out of action for too long, and his reflexes are slow.

   And at times the story feels as though it is drifting as well. The ending is overdone, as if intent on stifling itself on a morass of bad melodrama. But before the, well, the better hard-boiled detective novel is built on nuances and subtle shades of meaning, not wholly on fast-paced action, and so if that’s the sort of literature that catches your attention, most of what goes before should be exactly what you’re looking for.

UPDATE:   There was only one more Nick Caine novel, that being The Man of Glass (Holt. 1982). Donald Zochert also wrote one earlier work of crime fiction, Murder in the Hellfire Club (Holt, 1978), a historical mystery taking place in London into the mid-1700s.

RUSSELL THORNDYKE – The Amazing Quest of Doctor Syn. Doctor Syn #5. Rich & Cowan, UK, hardcover, 1938. Arrow, UK, paperback, 1964. Black Curtain Press, US, paperback, 2013.

   Still sends a shiver down the spine on a cold wet night, doesn’t it? Russell Thorndyke was a contemporary of John Buchan, and like him an admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, and his tales of the honorable pirate Captain Clegg, who with his band of men sought protection on Romney Marsh where the Captain, in the guise of meek and kindly 18th Century vicar Doctor Christopher Syn, supervises the going market in smuggling along England’s wild Western coastline, have been around for decades even fairly recently on BBC radio.

   The British have always liked their gentlemen heroes with a bit of larceny in their heart, from Robin Hood to Raffles and the Saint. Doctor Syn is in that same cool-headed, roguish, ruthless, and charming company. Captain Clegg never murdered, but he did execute, as does his second incarnation.

   Doctor Syn had a lively career for a quiet vicar. He featured in seven popular novels by Thorndyke, then in Dr. Syn (1936), a feature film starring George Arliss (to whom this book is dedicated) as both he and his ragged and tattered alter ego, the Scarecrow, on his steed Gehenna). That was followed by radio adaptations of the books, a revival by Hammer (Night Creatures, 1962), films with Peter Cushing (as the Rev. Dr. Blyss) in the role of the Scarecrow, and most famously on television on The Wonderful World of Disney, played by Patrick McGoohan, where Doctor Syn protected his flock from the vicious excise man and the British Navy’s Press gangs while making a good profit on smuggled French brandy and foiling the wreckers who preyed on unsuspecting seamen in The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh.

   The Amazing Quest of Doctor Syn is the fifth novel in the seven novel series, and as seen above, opens with a typically atmospheric introduction to the Scarecrow and his men, informing us “For years he had terrorized the level lands reclaimed from the sea, which stretch from Sandgate to Sussex border.” With agents as far away as London the good Doctor has an impressive spy service protecting him from every possible avenue.

   Of course nothing is perfect, as the good Doctor is about to find out.

   Only two men know the Scarecrow’s secret, Jimmy Bone the Highwayman who sometimes rides in the Doctor’s place so he can be in two places at once, and the rat-like but stalwart Mipps, sexton of the Doctor’s Dymchurch-under-the-Wall parish, where he also rides as the Scarecrow’s second-in-command, Hellspite, so the Scarecrow’s secrets are safe, but there are other threats to a man with the Doctor’s history.

   A mysterious Welshman has arrived in Dymchurch with a message for Doctor Syn. The Doctor and the Welshman are the last survivors of a Tontine (that favorite device of Victorian melodrama), joint inheritors of a vast fortune, but nothing is ever that simple in the good vicar’s world. The Welshman has been sent by his landlord in Wales, Tarroc Dolgenny (“He has made his name in North Wales, and I may add he will make it even bigger in hell.”), a smuggler who plans to murder Doctor Syn, see the fortune paid to the Welshman, and then kill him for the money by marrying the pretty niece who would inherit the fortune, then once the money is in his hands murder the girl as well.

   But Tarroc Dolgenny “A dangerous man.” hasn’t counted on crossing swords with the infamous Captain Clegg, much less the spectre of the Marshes, so Doctor Syn is off to Wales to pit himself against a villain of the first order, informing the Welsh lawyer Jones, “I might be dangerous too. In fact, I rather think I shall be if I ever meet this man.”

   First off, a bit of business at home takes precedent, rescuing Jimmy Bone from the gallows and dealing out a bit of justice to a cruel and corrupt lawman, but then the Vicar of Dmychurch is off and the adventure proper is on where Dolgenny proves a greater threat than expected, even suspecting the truth about Syn and the Scarecrow.

   The virtues of the books are that they move quickly full of incident, and that Thorndyke has a fine hand for adventure, history, and atmosphere. No less a contemporary and admirer of adventure tales and historical fiction than John Buchan praised his exciting novels, which in addition have the virtue of coming in at under two hundred pages.

   With Dolgenny a much more dangerous adversary than he thought, Doctor Syn is on his toes, outwitting the murderous brute, who would seem to have the upper hand, and bringing him to bay with quick wits and a quicker sword.

   So out of the night and sea mists of the Marsh company, the Scarecrow will ride again on his firey horse, evading the excise man, terrorizing the ignorant, tormenting the rich, and seeing to it that the people of England can enjoy a good Spanish wine or French brandy without that silly taxation business. Not everyone can be the Scarlet Pimpernel and save people from the Terror, and after all, Sir Percy must have appreciated a nice excise-free cognac after rescuing all those noble Frenchmen and had the Scarecrow to thank for that.

ANDREW KLAVAN – True Crime. Crown, hardcover. 1995. Dell, paperback, 1997. Warner, paperback, 1999. Film: Warner Brothers, 1999, with Clint Eastwood as Steve Everett and Isaiah Washington as Frank Beechum. Directed by Clint Eastwood.

   Klavan wrote the John Wells series as Keith Peterson — a dark group, also about a reporter, and a very good one. I’m not too familiar with his work under his own name, though I thought her previous novel, Corruption, was very good.

   Frank Beachum will die within less than 24 hours. He’s to be executed for the murder of a young pregnant woman, and there’s no hope of mercy or reprieve. Steve Everett is a reporter, a good one though not a very good man. A quirk of fate sends him to do a last-minute interview with the condemned man, and he leaves the prison shaken, convinced of his innocence.

   And so begins the frantic hours, as he searches for some way, any way, to avert what he now believes to be a terrible injustice. And unlikely champion, and a near hopeless quest.

   The thing about this book is that it works. Oh, after you’ve finished it and thought about it a while, you may think there were a couple of plot elements that really don’t stand close scrutiny, and maybe one or two characters who didn’t ring quite true.

   Maybe, and maybe you won’t. But if you do, it will certainly be afterward, because while you’re reading, the story will drag you along by the scruff of your neck. The suspense and air of impending doom are unrelenting, and the temptation to turn to the end and see what it will be is almost overpowering. And you won’t know until you get there. Trust me.

   Particulars? Klavan is a hell of a good writer,and the book is liberally laced with telling phrases, as “…drinking bourbon with a fine chaser of melancholy.” And if the letter Beachum writes to his daughter as awaits execution doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, I worry about you.

   The books is filled with sharply drawn characters, too, some etched in detail, some merely outlines, but all somehow real. You will remember Steve Everett,Frank Beachum, and Warden Luther Plunkitt, as a minimum, long after you put the book down. This goes on the 199 shelf alongside Cook’s Breakheart Hill, and I hope I’m lucky enough to read something else as good this year. But I won’t count on it.

Editorial Update:   Klavan received an Anthony Awards nomination in 1996 for True Crime in the Best Novel category.[

THE ADVENTURES OF ROCKY JORDAN “The Man from Cairo.” CBS, 01 January 1950. Cast: Jack Moyles as Rocky Jordan, Jay Novello as Captain Sam Sabaaya of the Cairo police. Guest cast (uncredited): Parley Baer. Sponsor: Del Monte Foods.

   When I started collecting radio shows on reel-to-reel tape, back in the early 70s, there were only a haphazard scattering of shows available, with very little in the way of documentation available for the anything you gladly picked up here and there from other traders and collectors.

   Things change. For many year I had only one show from this series (1948-50, 1951), plus two fifteen minutes episodes from its predecessor A Man Named Jordan (1945-47), which took place in Istanbul, rather than Cairo, the setting of the later series. Today almost all of the second run are available online, at the click of a mouse. Check out, for example the links here at archive.org.

   Whether Istanbul or Cairo, either setting was to listeners here in the US as exotic a place as they’d ever hope to be, and the producers of the show made sure the stories they told took full advantage of it. There also was no mistaking the resemblance to the movie Casablance: all of Rocky Jordan’s adventures were always based in and around the Cafe Tambourine, always the center of nefarious business.

   The writers of “The Man from Cairo” had a bit of extra fun with this one. The hapless tourist who happened to stop by Jordan’s cafe is not from Cairo, Egypt, but from Cairo, Illinois. A taker of home movies, he has enjoyed his stay, but he has one complaint: nothing exciting has happened. And of course as soon as says that, action begins, but he’s never on the scene when it does. Does he believe Rocky when he’s told that his life may be in danger? In a word, No.

   As the man from Cairo, Parley Baer is not credited in the role, but no one who’s listened to a lot of OTR, including his role as Chester Proudfoot in the long-running Gunsmoke on radio will mistake his most talented voice. A lot could be told in only 30 minutes on the radio, and this particular episode is no exception. Follow the link above to hear it for yourself.