JOHN D. MacDONALD – Free Fall in Crimson. Travis McGee #19. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1981. Fawcett, paperback, 1982. Reprinted a number of times since.

   I’ve been doing some research. The first Travis McGee story was entitled The Deep Blue Goodbye, and it was published first as a paperback in May of 1964, back when a book sold in softcover would set you back all of forty cents or so.

   It’s now exactly seventeen years, eighteen books, and an equal number of colors later [1981], and real money, the folding kind, is going to be what it takes to get your hands on a copy of the latest in the series. [$10.95] No more loose pocket change!

   This negative sort of progress notwithstanding, what this does is to illustrate one of the most remarkable aspects of John D. MacDonald’s long writing career. Ignored by the critics until just recently, he began in the late 1940’s writing hundreds of stories published in the pulp magazines {and mostly still buried there). In the 1950’s, with the demise of the pulps at hand, he switched to novels, with a list of them fully a page long, but all of them in paperback and in paperback only.

   Only in the last five or ten years has it been that his books have come out first in hardcover, and now when they do, they head straight for the bestseller list. Readers have known all along. They’ve known that MacDonald’s name on a story has meant just what they’ve been looking for.

   Today, of course, MacDonald is best known for his adventures of Travis McGee. Other than myriads of articles for TV Guide and blurbs for the dust jackets for the books of other authors, he seems to be writing nothing else. It seems a little strange for those of us who’ve been with him all the while, but apparently McGee is enough to keep the demands of the vast majority of his legions of fans satisfied.

   The format is restricting, but given the continued storytelling drive of a Free Fall in Crimson, plus the usual amount of free-wheeling MacDonald-ian philosophy thrown in for good measure, it seems unlikely that any change is due in the near future.

   In the opening chapters, McGee is still mourning the loss of Gretel, lost but then avenged when last we met him, in The Green Ripper. He is doing a lot of thinking about “destiny,” and not until this new case comes along does he extricate himself from the deep, self-induced funk he’s dug himself into.

   He is asked to investigate, long after the fact, the strange death of an artist’s estranged father. The man was dying of cancer, but perhaps not fast enough, for before he does, he is beaten to death by persons unknown in an isolated wayside rest area. His heir is his wife, from whom he was legally separated. Her current boyfriend specializes in making R-rated biker movies, but his latest films have not been faring well.

   McGee’s solution, when it comes to it, as it always does, is to give fate a handy shove in the right direction. Fate’s response, as is usual in JDM’s books, is tough and uncaring. Unfortunately, McGee neglects some loose ends this time, and as a result, in the next book it will be his best friend, Meyer, who will need some rehabilitating.

   In the Travis McGee universe, it is not wise to stand too close to the target area.

Rating: A minus.

711 OCEAN DRIVE. Columbia Pictures, 1950. Edmond O’Brien Edmond O’Brien, Joanne Dru, Otto Kruger, Barry Kelly. Director: Joseph M. Newman

   Edmond O’Brien stars in this remarkably average crime drama about the bookmaking racket. He portrays Mal Granger, a telephone company technician who works his way up in the criminal world, eventually becoming a top Syndicate figure on the West Coast. Along the way, he has a rival murdered, steals the rival’s girl (Joanne Dru), and then proceeds to knock off the hitman who he hired in the first place. All the while trying to outwit the Syndicate’s Cleveland-based boss (Otto Kruger).

   Tough stuff, with O’Brien giving a solid performance as a man whose heart is increasingly hardened by his chosen line of work. Unfortunately, it takes a long time for the movie to get going. The first half hour or so, especially, is a drag. Too much time is spent on Granger’s ability to rig a telephone system for a low-level bookie, one that would allow said bookie to get near instantaneous results from the track.

   This might have been interesting in 1950 – and I say might – but it is a drag now. The movie does perk up in the second and third acts, with the film culminating in a well executed and photographed chase and fight sequence set in and around the Hoover Dam in Nevada.

   Overall, 711 Ocean Drive is, as I said previously, average. I just don’t know what the title refers to! It’s never mentioned in the film (as far as I could tell) and it doesn’t seem to indicate anything special, other than possibly Granger’s fictional Malibu address once he becomes a big shot.

WILLIAM FULLER – Back Country. Dell First Edition #8, paperback, 1954. Stark House Press, 2022 (Black Gat #36).

   William Fuller, according to his publishers, was a merchant seaman, a hobo, a veteran of World War II, and a bit player in western movies. He also wrote seven novels about Brad Dolan, a big, tough drifter who travels around the south getting in and out of trouble.

   In Back Country, the first book in the series, Dolan’s car breaks down in Cartersville, a small town in central Florida. Many similar small towns turned up in the paperback originals of the 1950s, and Cartersville is filled with all the characters we love to hate — the Boss who runs the county and believes that “nigras” are all right if they slay in their place; the cruel, corrupt, pot-gutted lawmen; the redneck town bigots.

   Dolan enters this environment and makes all the wrong moves: He wins at gambling, insults the sheriff, makes time with the big Boss’s wife. Naturally, he gets beaten and thrown in jail, but that doesn’t stop him. He not only sleeps with the Boss’s wife, he sleeps with the Boss’s daughter. Then the wife is found in Dolan’s room with her throat cut, just as the town’s racial tension reaches a crisis.

   These ingredients may sound familiar, but Fuller mixes them expertly, keeping the pace fast and the characters believable. Dolan’s toughness (and his realization that he’s not quite as hard-boiled as he thinks) is convincingly handled. There’s a spectacularly vivid cockfighting sequence, and the setting is at times drawn with telling realism.

   Also recommended in the Brad Dolan series: Goat Island (1954) and The Girl in the Frame (1957).

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   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 WINDOW. RKO Radio Pictures, 1949. Barbara Hale, Arthur Kennedy, Paul Stewart, Ruth Roman, Bobby Driscoll. Based on the story “The Boy Cried Murder” by Cornell Woolrich. Director: Ted Tetzlaff.

   Adapted from a short story penned by Cornell Woolrich, The Window is an above average thriller and a suspenseful yarn that holds your attention from beginning to end. With child actor Bobby Driscoll as the glue that holds everything together, the film is never dull or lifeless.

   Driscoll, whose adult life was marked by tragedy, portrays Tommy Woodry, an excitable, imaginative young boy living with his working class parents in a modest apartment building in Manhattan. He’s known by both his peers and his parents for telling tall tales, stories about gangsters, Indians, and whatnot. So when he actually does witness a murder, no one believes him. He’s the boy who cried wolf.

   Aside from Driscoll, the film benefits from some talented actors. Arthur Kennedy portrays Tommy’s father, a man who is torn between the love he has for his son and his embarrassment at how the boy is seemingly turning into a compulsive liar. The upstairs neighbors, the ones who actually do commit a murder, are portrayed by radio star Paul Stewart and the prolific Ruth Roman. They make a great villainous couple.

   There’s a lot to admire in The Window, from the acting to the cinematography and lighting. There’s a shadowy menace to the stairwell in the Woodrys’ apartment building, one that is used to heighten the dangerous situation in which Tommy has found himself. There is also a white knuckle ending that takes place in a nearby condemned building.

   This was the second time I’ve had the occasion to watch this movie,and I enjoyed it even more this time. I realized how very much it’s both a Woolrich movie and a New York City one. As much as anything else, this film is about the struggles of postwar life (and death) in the Big Apple.
   

HARRIGAN AND SON “Hello Goodbye.” ABC/Desilu. 12 May 1961 (Season 1, Episode 30). Pat O’Brien (James Harrigan Sr.), Roger Perry (James Harrigan Jr.), Georgine Darcy, Helen Kleeb. Director: Sherman Marks.

   While nominally a lawyer series, one watching the video of this episode below soon comes to the quick and savvy conclusion that it was in reality a comedy show instead. Maybe the thirty minute running time should have been the tipoff. Most of the series featuring courtroom cases and the like were an hour long. A half hour simply isn’t enough time to get into the nitty gritty details of a full-fledged murder case, for example.

   Harrigan and Son was a – well, you guessed it – a small father and son legal firm, with the ever smooth Pat O’Brien as the father, and three relative unknowns filling out the rest of the cast. (You may, however remember Georgina Darcy playing “Miss Torso” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.)

   The series was on for one season, long enough to be able to blink a couple of times before missing it. After James Harrigan the senior has a rough day in court, he decides to retire and let his son take over the firm on his own. After some not really very funny incidents in which he finds he’s not having any fun either, he decides that he’s not really ready to retire just yet.

   Amusing, perhaps, but certainly not laugh out loud funny. I’d never heard of this one before stumbling across it on YouTube, and I’m willing to wager none of you have either.
   

TIMOTHY FULLER – Three Thirds of a Ghost. Jupiter Jones #2. Little, Brown, hardcover, 1941. Popular Library #81, paperback, 1946.

   When his first novel, Harvard Has a Homicide, was published in 1936, Timothy Fuller — just twenty-two and a Harvard undergraduate — was hailed as an important mystery-story prodigy. He never quite lived up to the promise of that first book, however, either in his productivity or in the quality of his later work.

   It was five years before he published his second and third mysteries, another two years until his fourth, and seven more until his fifth and final book. And only Reunion with Murder (1941) and This Is Murder, Mr. Jones (1943) can be said to equal or surpass Harvard Has a Homicide in plotting and technique.

   Despite its inherent flaws, however, Three Thirds of a Ghost may well be Fuller’s most appealing work. One of the reasons-perhaps the main reason-is that it is set primarily in a Boston bookshop, Bromfield’s, where writer Charles Newbury (who specializes in roman a clef novels about important Boston families, not to mention mysteries featuring an Oriental detective known as the Parrot) is shot to death while addressing 200 guests at Bromfield’s 150th birthday celebration.

   In Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor call Three Thirds of a Ghost “disappointing.” And so it is, in terms of its rather thin plot and dubious gimmick to explain how Newbury could be killed without any of the 200 witnesses seeing who fired the shot.

   But Harvard Fine Arts instructor Jupiter Jones, the amateur sleuth who also stars in Fuller’s other four novels, is an engaging bumbler; the cast of characters — especially Jupiter’s girlfriend (later wife), Helen, Newbury’s non-stereotypical. Chinese secretary, Lin, and some refreshingly intelligent cops — is diverse and well drawn; and there are amusing bits of business interspersed with plenty of barbed commentary on the writing and selling of books and on pre-World War II Boston society.

   If your taste runs to the humorous, sophisticated, slightly screwball type of storytelling popular in the 1930s, this bibliomystery (and any of the other Jupiter Jones romps) is definitely your sort of Boston tea party.

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   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.

MARK CHANNING – Nine Lives. Colin Gray #4. G G Harrap and Co, UK, hardcover, 1937. J. B. Lippincott, US, hardcover, 1937.

   Warning, this is an adventure novel of the fantastic from the late 1930’s written by a former British Officer and Colonial resident of India and reflects that. If that is a non-starter for you I understand, but if you have a bit broader view, this is a rousing adventure by that rarest of things, a Colonial who went far deeper and with far more sympathy into his adopted homeland and produced a series of books that reflected that in the manner of another Colonial anti Imperialist writer, the more famous Talbot Mundy.

   …there is an ancient saying that the cat has nine lives. Sometimes there happen uncanny things, which almost makes it seem as if the cat, as she steps down through the ages, meditative and aloof…is dimly aware of her ancient divinity and its obligations.

   General Hector Dalziell, head of the British Secret Service in India, is in a state. Suleman (sic) Khan, a bandit fanatic who believes himself to be the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, and head of the cult the Servants of Genghis Khan a Pan Islamic movement rather like an early Al Queada, is on the rise and seeks to finance his adventure with the fabulous treasure found in Channing’s first novel, King Cobra, and Dalziell’s second best man is missing.

   Channing, being rather saner than most pulp style adventure writers, spends a bit of time discussing fanaticism in religion among all faiths including Hindu, Muslim, and Christian, and it should be noted among Channing’s other works, he wrote about what he believed were the common basis for all faiths, and as the book progresses his hero will encounter allies across the spectrum of Indian faiths, Hindu and Muslim.

   It is still a European’s view of India and Indian custom, but it is from a sympathetic eye, not a sneering one certain the native population are children incapable of governing themselves.

   Which does bring us to our hero, General Dalziell’s number one man, and the hero of all four of Channing’s novels, Colin Gray, the von “Richtophen of the Indian Secret Service,” the bronzed grey-eyed near superhuman hero of the whole thing, a cross between Talbot Mundy’s Jimgrim and Athelston King, Doc Savage, and James Bond (he’s ruthless, beautiful women fall at his feet, and he likes sports cars with loud exhausts).

   Gray is a bit on the splendid side, but Channing allows him to also be testy, and at times blind to the greater powers confronting him. He is not above being wrong, stubborn, and in awe of forces he may not understand. All four books pit the rather grounded Secret Service hero against forces of good and evil at war on different planes of existence and his key role is often despite his blindness to the greater world around him.

   Lost worlds, mysterious cults, and secret wars at higher planes fill all the books, but thankfully always act as color to the adventures rather than over shadowing them if the supernatural puts you off.

   Gray is currently in Cairo on his honeymoon with his bride Diana (who he met in King Cobra) and is the man who discovered the treasures of the Valley of the Mirror. He is quickly recalled with orders to secure the treasure or destroy it before Khoon can seize it and set India and Asia ablaze. After a bit of set up including a meeting with an expert in Egyptology in Alexandria, a murder attempt, news that Dalziell has been assassinated, and a hurried escape from Egypt our basic crew is assembled.

   Gray of course on Dalziell’s last orders, his wife Diana (whose life is in danger apart from him), who won’t hear of staying behind, Limbu, Gray’s Gurkha orderly (and okay, though courageous as a lion he is a bit too Gunga Din at times), and one uninvited and unwanted crew member they simply cannot get rid of, a small black Kitten called Barfy adopted by Diana in Alexandria in the shadows of a statue of the goddess Bast, named after Egyptian mystic Dr. Barfopulos.

   The latter had warned Gray and Diana in Cairo of a Mongol assassin of Khoon’s who made an attempt on their life and imparted the strange fact that Suleman Khoon hates and fears cats are the main figures though there are seven characters whose lives will be changed by events.

   I needn’t point out after that introductory passage I quoted Barfy is vital and indeed central to the plot, but can reassure you she is not only a cute black kitten, she is also a tough, semi feral little beast who Gray cannot abide but tolerates and is eventually supremely grateful for and gets no more wordage than she deserves.

   Mark Channing, Leopold Aloysius Matthew Jones, was a British officer who after distinguishing himself in the Boer War spent most of his career in India. By the time of the Gray novels he was an officer with a British Indian Bank and a student of Indian religion, something that plays a key role in many of his novels, including this one with a high placed adept who can apparently transport himself physically with his mind, something that proves as key to Gray’s ultimate success as a small near feral black kitten.

   The fate of the East, is at hand, not the Raj, but all of the East and world peace. Suleman Khoon is no Dr. Fu Manchu, but an ambitious and intelligent political figure exploiting fanaticism for power and personal gain. Modern parallels are fairly obvious.

   So our heroes are off into Kalistan, the land of blackness, where man and nature both oppose them, all a run up to a slam bang pulp style ending with a supernaturally malign tiger, Shiv, sent to murder a bewitched Gray and only a small black kitten between him and death, but Barfy is beloved of Sekmet, Bast, the Egyptian cat god and might just be Shiv’s match.

   Never worry, though. Channing doesn’t cheat, it is all done straight with perfectly reasonable explanations for what happens, if you care to believe them.

   For the course of the book, I align more with Limbu, who sees what the European’s do not.

   Like Mundy before him, Channing is a gifted spinner of tales balancing the fantastic with humor and reality. If you enjoy this kind of pulp fantasia done well Channing is in the same class as Mundy, Ganpat, and Achmed Abdullah, and like them his love of the East and its peoples shows through.

   Inevitably any Colonial is an outsider, but there are rare outsiders, John Masters, Paul Scott, James A. Michener, and Rumer Godden among them who glimpse something of the beauty of a world not their own and convey it.

   The four Channing novels — King Cobra, White Python, Poisoned Mountain, and this — are pulp adventure, but superb pulp adventure and written with sympathy and even empathy for the people and culture they depict and not merely exploitation. Nine Lives is my favorite of the four, but if you want to try them White Python, the second Colin Gray book, is in print in a Trade Paperback edition from Armchair Fiction’s Lost Race Classics for a reasonable price, and King Cobra can be found among the Luminist Society Archives in pdf form.

   Besides which I am a sucker for small feral black kittens touched by the ancestral memory of ancient Egyptian goddesses.

THE SPIKES GANG. United Artists, 1974. Lee Marvin (Harry Spikes), Gary Grimes, Ron Howard, Charles Martin Smith, Arthur Hunnicutt, Noah Beery Jr. Loosely based on the novel The Bank Robber, by Giles Tippette. (See comment #1.) Director: Richard Fleischer.

   The Spikes Gang begins with what can only be described as unrealistic, perhaps a little too innocent, dialogue. A wounded bank robber by the name of Harry Spikes (Lee Marvin) is saved by three teenage boys: Wil (Gary Grimes), Tod (Charles Martin Smith), and Les (Ron Howard). Recovering in Wil’s family’s barn, he develops a budding friendship with them.

   Problem is: Spikes doesn’t talk, nor act, like a bank robber or a killer. He’s too genial and the boys, in a state of semi-awe, also sound too saccharine in their dialogue. Only in the second half of the film does one realize that this was all put on screen for a purpose. As it turns out, The Spikes Gang is as much a tragic coming of age story as it is a western.

   After a recuperated Spikes leaves on Wil’s horse, Wil  decides to leave his family’s homestead and seek new adventures elsewhere. His friends Tod and Les come along for the ride, both literal and proverbial. What begins as a grand adventure, however, quickly turns sour. The boys realize they have no money, no food, and no source of steady employment.

   So what do they do? You guessed it. They rob a bank. In the process, Tod kills a state senator. The boys are now outlaws. And where do Texas outlaws go? Mexico, of course. That’s where they reunite with Harry Spikes and form the eponymous Spikes Gang.

   The theme of the movie is the loss of innocence. The boys who stood in awe in front of Harry Spikes at the beginning of the movie soon realize that he’s no angel and no role model. He is a self-centered egotist who only looks after himself, even if it means selling the boys down the river for a pardon from the governor.

   Overall, I rather enjoyed this one. It’s somewhat unconventional, to be sure. It reminded me in some ways of Will Penny (1968) which I reviewed here years ago. That’s high praise.

THE INFILTRATOR. Warner Brothers, 2016. Bryan Cranston, Juliet Aubrey, Diane Kruger, John Leguizamo. Benjamin Bratt, Amy Ryan. Director: Brad Furman.

   In this 2016 biopic based on true events, Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) shines as Robert Mazur, a Customs Agent tasked with an undercover assignment to bring down a Colombian drug cartel and their money laundering collaborators.

   Assuming the fake identity of a New York mafioso named Bob Musella, Mazur develops a close friendship and business partnership with Colombian kingpin Roberto Alcaino (Benjamin Bratt), a man who seeks his role in the cocaine trade as strictly business. Mazur/Musella also interacts with a coterie of oddball characters, killers, and criminal bankers all too eager to take the cartel’s cash and launder it through Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

   Much of the movie is devoted to showcasing how very dangerous Mazur’s assignment was. More than once does he narrowly escape death. Fortunately for him, he has reliable partners in Emir Abreu (John Leguizamo) and Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger), who also goes undercover and poses as Musella’s fiance.

   The Infiltrator isn’t the type of movie that holds your hand and guides you gently through the proceedings. It moves at breakneck speed, particularly at the beginning, and rarely gives you a chance to catch your breath and decipher who is doing what to whom. This music video style of filmmaking doesn’t always serve the movie well – there are some scenes which are just too short and confusing – but overall, when it works, it works extraordinarily well.

   Overall, I enjoyed this one. More than I thought I would, I should add. Cranston really holds it all together. Without him, I am not sure the movie would have clicked for me the way it did.

SAMUEL FULLER – The Dark Page. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1944.Mercury, digest-sized paperback, 1951, as Murder Makes a Deadline. Avon, paperback, 1982. Film: Columbia Pictures, 1952, as Scandal Sheet.

   Film director Sam Fuller is a stylish, iconoclastic auteur whose movies transform tabloid trash into cinematic art. The characters in his films are larger than life, their dialogue often sounding like the copy off the back of a paperback; yet the broad strokes of his scripts are turned to poetry by fluid camera work and startling visual imagery, redeeming graces his novels tend to lack.

   His career as a novelist is, then, considerably less significant, although perhaps no other film-maker of his stature has written so many novels. Prior to his film-making career, Fuller wrote lurid topical tales (Burn Baby Burn, 1935; Test Tube Baby, 1936), foreshadowing such “out of the headlines” Fuller films as Pickup on South Street (1953) and Underworld USA (1960).

   His later books are novelizations either of films he made (The Naked Kiss, 1963) or of films he failed to make (144 Picadilly, 1971). His claim to fame as a novelist, however, rests upon The Dark Page, a fast-moving, effective crime novel that reflects Fuller’s love for Hearst-school yellow journalism, that lurid National Enquirer style of reporting that Fuller’s movies hinge upon and transcend.

   City editor Carl Chapman throws a Lonely Hearts Ball at Madison Square Garden, a cynical media event designed to boost the circulation of his paper, the Comet. At the party, which is attended by his wife, Rose (to whom he’s happily married), he encounters Charlotte, a former wife from his former, secret life. Returning with Charlotte (whom he had never divorced) to her shabby apartment, an argument ensues and Charlotte is killed, more or less accidentally.

   Chapman’s star reporter, Lance McCleary, latching on to the fact that the murdered woman had attended the Lonely Hearts Ball, pursues the story vigorously, not realizing he is closing in on his mentor, editor Chapman. Chapman, too, cannot resist the headline-making story, and feels just as proud as he does threatened, as Lance’s muckraking tactics lead Chapman into further deceit and murder.

   Fuller’s style in The Dark Page is lively, the melodrama made palatable by the short, choppy sentences and paragraphs that are right out of his newspaper background. Well worth reading for its own merits, The Dark Page is a fascinating footnote in the story of a major, if offbeat, American film director.

   A tidy little B movie was fashioned from The Dark Page, but, ironically, Fuller didn’t make it: The adaptation, Scandal Sheet (1953), with Broderick Crawford as the city editor and John Derek as his metaphorical son, was directed by fellow B-movie magician Phil Karlson.

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   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.