WHITE TIE AND TAILS. Universal Pictures, 1946. Dan Duryea, Ella Raines, William Bendix, Donald Curtis, Seymour S. Hinds. Screenplay by Bertram Millhauser. Story by Rufus King and Charles Beahan. Directed by Charles Barton. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   Charles Dumont (Dan Duryea) is the perfect butler, a man who can mix the perfect martini, keep up with his mistress’s spectacles, advise his master on art purchases, and solve their children’s teenage problems all in the course of readying the family to leave on their vacation. The Latimers just can’t function without him.

   He even reminds them to give the staff paid holidays while they are gone.

   But Charles Dumont has an ulterior motive. You see Charles is planning a staycation, where he will enjoy the lifestyle of his employer and indulge in the life of a playboy with a little help from the chauffeur George (Frank Jenks).

   What could possibly go wrong?

   Well… for instance on his first night on the town, Charles could meet beautiful wealthy Louise Bradford (Ella Raines) and her father (Samuel S. Hinds), and while endeavoring to impress the beautiful Louise as something of a charming mystery man, he could discover her sister is involved with Nick Romano (Donald Curtis) who works for casino owner Ludie (William Bendix) and owes Ludie $100,000 dollars, and naturally Charles offers to write a check to cover the amount because Mr. Bradford will repay him the next morning and Ludie, a charming fellow impressed by Charles clothes and manner, will happily call Romano off and cut off the sister’s future credit.

   Again, what could possibly go wrong?

   Save Mr. Bradford is going to need time to sell some bonds and raise that $100 K in cash and Mr. Ludie is going to come calling at the Latimer mansion to check on Charles legitimacy and seeing the Latimer’s art collection, which Charles can’t help but show off as his own, Ludie is going to take a few paintings as collateral until he cashes Charles check.

   And from there on it gets complicated, as Charles, who gave up a promising art career because it was easier to be a butler and now is falling for Louise, and his house of cards is getting more and more precarious.

   This charming romantic comedy is a surprise for Duryea who is perfectly suited to the lead and romances the lovely well-cast Raines, ably abetted by Bendix as an urbane figure (almost as much of a stretch for Bendix as Duryea) who would like a little tutoring in clothes and art and style from Charles if not for the little matter of that $100 K.

   Jenks even gets a nice scene as he tries to win back the $100K at Ludie’s casino at the crap table.

   In the manner of romantic comedy, the complications pile on until it seems as if there is no way a happy ending can be eked out of the mess, and then, being romantic comedy it somehow is and charmingly so.

   It is also refreshing that Raines and Duryea hit it right off, and she is level-headed and smart and not the least the flighty screwball heiress.

   This is not a mystery or crime film, though several times it seems as if it might be. Maybe it’s just Duryea’s presence though, and the fact that half of the writing team for the original story is mystery writer Rufus King, creator of Philo Vance-like Reginald De Puyster, Lt. Valcour, Colin Starr, and Chief Bill Dugan.

   What it is, though, is an involving attractive and intelligent romantic comedy. As far as I know it is Duryea’s only lead in a romantic comedy (he is in several comedies including Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, but usually playing comic versions of Dan Duryea roles). It is quite possibly unique in this aspect, though I think you will agree after watching it that it should not have been.

   I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out of Duryea’s great villain and character parts, but it would have been nice if he got a few more chances like this to show other aspects of his talent.
   

ROBERT L. FISH – The Incredible Schlock Homes: 12 Stories from Bagel Street. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1966. Avon, softcover, 1976.

   Only the most humorless Sherlockians could object to the way their hero is treated in these enormously funny parodies, all twelve of which were originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Because Fish clearly knew the canon, these stories arc also excellent pastiches of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He has captured Doyle’s style in having a Dr. Watson narrate the events, and the cases generally start with the same time-tested devices used to begin the Sherlock Holmes tales. A distressed potential client appears, and Homes, who has never seen him or her before, uses his best deductive methods to guess pertinent facts. He is totally wrong, but hilariously so.

   Starting with a decidedly cockeyed chronology, “Watson” proceeds to refer to past successes of Homes’s, and these are merely excuses for some of the most outrageous puns ever to appear in the mystery genre. For example, Homes’s efforts on behalf of a Polish group are included as “The Adventure of the Danzig Men.” The detective’s involvement with a British lord who, because of dishonesty, had to resign from his clubs is called “The Adventure of the Dismembered Peer.”

   Obviously, nothing is to be sacred here, including the names of the famous characters. Watson goes under the name “Watney,” Mrs. Hudson becomes “Mrs. Essex,” and Professor Moriarty operates as “Professor Marty.” The action starts at 221B Bagel Street.

   “The Adventure of the Ascot Tie,” Fish’s first published story, is probably the best in the collection, but it is only minutely superior to “The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clark,” “The Adventure of the Artist’s Mottle,” and “The Adventure of the Snared Drummer.”

   Another group of stories, almost as good, was collected and published as The Memoirs of Schlock Homes (1974). All are delightful to read as they lovingly spoof the methods and idiosyncrasies of the most famous character in all of literature, exposing the frequently tenuous reasoning by which Sir Arthur’s hero came up with his solutions. Schlock’s methods are very similar-except he is always wrong, to our comic delight.

   It is proof of the permanent appeal of Sherlock Holmes that a talented writer like Robert L. Fish can take him apart, giving us great pleasure. and yet at the same time make us anxious to read the original stories once again.

         ———
   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.

JEROME ODLUM – Each Dawn I Die.  Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1938. To be published by Stark House Press as a Staccato Books imprint edition in September. (See comment #4.) Film: First National/Warner Brothers, 1939, withe James Cagney, George Raft.

   Frank Ross is a reporter digging up dirt on the corrupt local administration when he gets sapped by some goons and set up on a phony vehicular homicide rap. And sent up to prison for 20 years.

   “When you first came here, you imagined that every day would bring your release. Then you started figuring in weeks, then months. And now you’re beginning to feel it’s nearly hopeless. And you hate all the world and God and Jesus Christ for letting you in for a mess like this. You don’t want any part of them….  When you came here, you had no intention of adopting the code of the convict. But now you’re not only a convict by number and garb; you’re also a convict at heart. That’s what the dumb taxpayers and yard sprinklers and grass mowers and God and Jesus Christ and all the rest of the world have done for you. That’s what prison has made of you. The hell with all of them.”

   It’s a good prison yarn with plenty of gory details. Then the ending goes all Hollywood on you and everything’s smiles, rainbows and cotton candy. But until that point you’ve got a solid story of prisoners, the weasels running the prison and their succubae. But for the ending, I liked it.

RIDE THE PINK HORSE. Universal, 1947. Robert Montgomery, Wanda Hendrix, Andrea King, Thomas Gomez, Fred Clark, Art Smith, Martin Garralaga and John Doucette. Screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, based on the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes. Directed by Robert Montgomery.

   The one non-Boston Blackie film I’ve seen on TV lately was Ride the Pink Horse, starring and directed by Robert Montgomery. Not a great film by any means, but interesting throughout. Montgomery had, by all accounts, an unusually high IQ, and it has always seemed to me that his films are all marked by an almost intangible quality of Intelligence. The failures as well as the successes seem to presuppose a certain degree of of the movie-going audience (a classically underestimated group) and work from there.

   The well-known extended subjective camerawork in Lady in the Lake, for example, is hardly an unqualified triumph, but it’s the sort of thing somebody had to try sooner or later; All it took  was a director who had some confidence in his audience.

   Likewise the sly references in Montgomery’s autobiographical daydream-movie Once More, My Darling, where Ann Blyth conveys a hitherto-unsuspected and startling sensuality while we wait for things to get funny, which they never really do.

   Montgomery’s intelligence often showed itself even in films he didn’t direct but merely acted in. There’s his effete quisling in The Big House, the blandly ingenuous psycho in Night Must Fall,  the Detective/Prince in Trouble for Two, and the memorable Here Comes Mr. Jordan   and They Were Expendable,   all films marked by much more thoughtfulness than is common in movies of their sort.

   Oddly enough, it’s this very intelligence that mitigates against Ride the Pink Horse,  in which Montgomery portrays Lucky Gagin, a not-too-bright petty crook out for revenge against Fred Clark as a murderous Political Boss; He just never convinces us that he’s as dumb as his character is supposed to be. Montgomery walks and talks just like a pug throughout the film, but every so often he visibly relaxes and just listens while another character talks, and in these moments his face betrays him with a perceptive, alert expression that all the Dis ‘n’ Dats in his dialogue just can’t hide.

   What we have here is an educated man playing a Dummy, and for all his brains, Montgomery just ain’t a good enough actor to hide it.

   I should go on to add, though, that except for this, Ride the Pink Horse is just about everything you could want in a film noir and more, with moody lighting, long, expressive takes, a host of skillfully limned minor characters, and the showy stylistic flourishes one expects from this genre.

   Yet even the standard film noir brutality takes an oddly thoughtful turn here: for though the Good Guys in this movie take an awful lot of physical abuse — very graphically portrayed — the Baddies get their lumps off-camera, if at all. And this is not a small point when you’re talking about film noir.

   One of the staples of Classic noirs no one ever mentions is that grin of Guilty Pleasure lighting the features of Bogart, Powell, et. al. as they prepare to deliver a well-deserved ass-kicking to their erstwhile tormentors. Nothing like that ever happens in Ride the Pink Horse, as if Montgomery were trying to subtly convey that violence is, after all, the province of the Bad Guys, and we grown-ups must look elsewhere for catharsis.

   Hmm. Bob Montgomery may not be the best moviemaker ever, but he maybe deserves more attention than he’s been getting.

DAVID GOODIS – Retreat from Oblivion. E.P. Dutton, hardcover, 1939. To be published in paperback by Stark House Press, paperback, October, 2024. (See comments.)

   Peyton Place meets WWII. Extramarital affairs between friends and neighbors in the rising middle bracket of Manhattan, circa 1939.

   Herb and wife Jean, they’re a pretty bad scene. Jean’s screwing Herb’s friend Paul. And frankly, Jean dear, he don’t give a damn.

   Then Jean gets preggers and Paul heads with her to China to become a fighter pilot against the Japanese. Which is good for the reader because Goodis can really write a good pulpy aviation yarn (given his record of selling air adventure stories to the aviation pulps).

   As Jean absconds with Paul, Herb’s on the make. He’s feeling reckless (was just at a go-kart track with a list of rules including ‘no wreckless driving’. The ‘w’ in ‘wreckless’ still visible through the white-out). Herb heads to Harlem and starts following a very attractive Italian looking girl. She stops and recommends the prostitutes one street over. He says he just needs someone to talk to. And it turns out, so does she.

   Her name’s Dorothy. Her husband is fighting the fascists in Spain. So now Herb feels guilty and can’t sleep with her. Even though she first tells him it’s okay and later begs for it.

   More good news for the reader. Dorothy’s hubbie being in the Spanish Civil War allows Goodis to write alternating chapters teleporting the reader from Peyton Place to the war in Spain with plenty of battle scenes for the losing cause.

   So that’s the picture. Peyton Place melodrama montaged with wartime atrocities.

   What it could have amounted is a critique of the hypocritical Manhattan high-life where everybody’s trying to screw their neighbor in every way they can, whilst elsewhere people are heroically facing death and destruction.

   Yet when the time comes to hammer this point home, Goodis settles for the Hollywood ending. Perhaps seeking a Hollywood ending for himself, picturing himself in pictures, retreating from the existential oblivion that would hound him til the end.

E. X. FERRARS – Frog in the Throat.  Virginia Freer #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1980. Bantam, paperback, 1981. Felony & Mayhem Press, softcover, 2021.

   Virginia Freer, heroine of Frog in the Throat, is staying with craftsmen friends Helen and Andrew Boscott (he’s a furniture restorer, she’s a weaver and tapestry worker) for a much-needed holiday. On a quiet afternoon, in walks the big mistake of Virginia’s life — Felix Freer, her estranged husband. Felix is one of those charming people who have few scruples and an overwhelming capacity for lying-even when he thinks he’s telling the truth. He is now lying about his reasons for dropping in at the Boscott house, and Virginia wonders why.

   The events of the evening only complicate matters. At a neighbor’s cocktail party, novelist Carleen Fyffe (half of a famous sister team of historical-romance writers) announces her engagement to poet Basil Deering (whom Felix has expressed an interest in meeting). Shortly after the Freers and Boscotts return home, Olivia Fyffe arrives, saying she has found her sister on the floor of their den, murdered. When they all go to the Fyffe cottage, however, there is no body.

   Almost everyone thinks Olivia is being dramatic for some reason of her own, or perhaps hysterical. It takes a second body and the discovery of her sister’s corpse to prove otherwise, and a certain amount of detection on Virginia’s part to determine Felix’s connection with the murders.

   The pace of this novel is slow, with good characterization of all participants except the heroine. The plot unfolds in the best tradition of the British country-house mystery, with plenty of suspicion and all ends tied up nicely at the conclusion. One wishes, however, that Virginia Freer were as well characterized as her enigmatic and complex husband and hosts. It is a little hard to care what happens to any of them when the viewpoint character is so lacking in substance.

   Ferrars has been writing mysteries for over forty years; many of her tales are set in such locales as Greece, Africa, Mexico, and Australia, as well as in England. Other notable titles include Give the Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Hunt the Tortoise (1950), The Busy Body (1962), The Seven Sleepers (1970), The Cup and the Lip ( 1976 ), and Crime and the Crystal (1985).

     ———
   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.

   Following Gambit (1962), covered in my post on “Booby Trap” (1944), Rex Stout’s The Mother Hunt (1963) finds Nero Wolfe hired by the widow of drowned novelist Richard Valdon, whose later book His Own Image he had preferred to the million-copy bestseller Never Dream Again. Somebody has left a baby in Lucy’s vestibule with a note reading, “THIS BABY IS FOR YOU BECAUSE A BOY SHOULD LIVE IN HIS FATHERS [sic] HOUSE.” She is understandably eager to learn the mother’s identity, hoping that will be “close enough” to proving that the baby—whom she smilingly says she might name Moses if she decides to keep him, “because no one knew for sure who Moses’ father was”—really is Dick’s son.

   His overalls yield a clue, handmade horsehair buttons that baffle “button fiend” Nicholas Losseff of the Exclusive Novelty Button Co.; a Times ad nets a reward for Beatrice Epps, whose temporary colleague at realtor Quinn and Collins, secretary Anne Tenzer, said hers were made by her aunt. Archie is directed by Anne to Ellen Tenzer in Mahopac, and gets the bum’s rush, but when he spots the Times open to that page, he knows she knows more than she’s telling. She leaves while he’s phoning in, and in her absence he enters through an open window to find evidence—later confirmed—that, while obviously not the mother of the child, whom she called Buster, she did have the boy there until three weeks earlier.

   Watching the house, Orrie reports seeing Purley arrive with the local law and Lon reveals that Ellen was found in her car in Manhattan, strangled with a piece of cord; Archie feels responsible, and knows it won’t be long before Cramer learns of his visit. Alerting Lucy, he is hauled in and gives A.D.A. Mandel et al. an edited version of the truth—not naming her—before Parker bails him out. Confident that his remit will encompass identifying the killer, Wolfe leaves Ellen to the police and starts at the other end, asking Lucy to convene Parthenon Press president Julian Haft, agent Willis Krug, TV producer Leo Bingham, and Distaff editor Manuel Upton, who knew most about Dick’s broad circle of acquaintances.

   Lucy and all but Upton provide lists totaling 148 women, fruitlessly investigated over 26 days at the cost of $8,674.30 to the client, suddenly confronted by Purley with knowledge of both the baby and Wolfe’s hiring, but staying clammed up. Stage three of this mother hunt entails having Lon trumpet the fact that a “nurse”—actually Dol Bonner’s employee Sally Corbett, last seen in Plot It Yourself (1959)—wheels Buster around in Washington Square twice a day. The carriage is rigged with cameras, so that Sally can snap candids of anyone who takes a look, as it is presumed the mother would do; Saul sees a woman take a taxi there, pegged by Lucy as Distaff fiction editor Carol Mardus…Krug’s ex-wife.

   Saul verifies that in January, “Clara Waldron” bore a baby boy in Sarasota, Florida, but before Wolfe, risking charges of withholding evidence or conspiring to obstruct justice, can plan his next move, she comes to him. Determined to ask and not answer questions, she admits merely that neither Haft, Krug nor Bingham—all of whom denied recognizing her photo, even her ex—is the father, then decamps, only to be found strangled like Ellen.

   Learning of this, a piqued Wolfe actually throws his suit jacket at Archie, who fortunately survives this assault with a deadly garment; also unusually, he gets romantically involved with someone besides Lily, and the client to boot, mixing personal and business relations.

   After Wolfe questions the Three Stooges about Carol’s history, including earlier liaisons with Dick—reportedly first among equals—Upton, and many others, he and Archie duck out the back, dodging Cramer. Having providentially obtained a key from Lucy, Archie hides them in her house while she is at her Long Island beach cottage, getting provisions from a deli en route; when she returns, he explains that Krug and Bingham have satisfied them as to Dick’s paternity. Wolfe has Lucy summon Upton, held by force, followed by Cramer and the others, and Saul brings Anne, whose temporary positions included one as Haft’s private secretary, in the course of which she mentioned that Ellen boarded babies.

   The inexplicably retitled “Motherhunt” (5/12 & 19/02), a two-part second-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, bears the credit “Alan Smithee,” the generic Directors Guild of America pseudonym. It here conceals the sole directorial effort of Charles B. Wessler, a prolific producer of lowbrow comedies such as the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber (1994) and There’s Something About Mary (1998). Adapted by that season’s consulting producer, Sharon Elizabeth Doyle, it features several name guest-stars—Carrie Fisher (as Ellen), Griffin Dunne (Lossoff [sic]), and Penelope Ann Miller (Lucy)—and two newbies making their sole series appearances: Brooke Burns (Beatrice) and Erinn Bartlett (Anne).

   Doyle gives Lucy a secretary, Miss Mimm (Shannon Jobe); a pet cause, killer fog (caused by coal smoke, and claiming 4,000 Londoners in 1952), on which she is shown delivering a lecture; and a varied musical proficiency. Fisher’s close friend, Dunne makes Lossoff suitably colorful, the first link in a chain that leads Archie (Timothy Hutton) to the sultry Beatrice and Anne and—via directions from a “local sage,” i.e., a Garage Attendant (Jim Davis)—the ill-fated Ellen. Her cottage is covered in shifts by Saul (Conrad Dunn), Fred (Fulvio Cecere), and Orrie (Trent McMullen), who sees the arrival of Purley (R.D. Reid), and her murder is outlined to Archie and Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) by Lon (Saul Rubinek).

   In a typically heated confrontation, Wolfe tells Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), “I would sleep under a bridge and eat scraps before I would submit a client to official harassment,” said client directing Wolfe to Bingham (James Tolkan)—now in radio—Haft (Steve Cumyn), Krug (Boyd Banks), and sole holdout Upton (Richard Waugh). A nice montage intercuts the ’teers eliminating potential mothers from Arizona to the Riviera and Fritz (Colin Fox) crossing off their names on a huge chart. Warned that she might wind up at headquarters, Lucy tells Purley, “I’ve always wanted to see them. My grandfather’s company poured the foundations”; Archie deems her a good enough dancer to take to the Flamingo Club.

   Doyle adds a flirtatious quality to Archie’s relationship with Sally (Manon von Gerkan), “who had made it necessary to revise my prejudice against female ops,” and is portrayed as a smoldering blonde before being deglamorized in her role as nurse. Rounding out this profusion of pulchritude, Carol (Kathryn Zenna) learns that Wolfe has inquired about her, seeking to find out why; Lucy displays undue interest in her visit, and the jacket-thrower calls Theodore—invoked but unseen on Chaykin’s series—on the house phone to cancel their 9:00 session with the orchids. Wolfe repays Lucy’s hospitality by scrambling eggs for them all, a process that according to him requires 40 minutes to be done to perfection.

            — Copyright © 2024 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Murder Is Corny”

Edition cited:  The Mother Hunt: Bantam (1964)

Online source:

E. X. FERRARS – Alive and Dead. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1975. Bantam, paperback, 1982.

   The novels of E. X. Ferrars (a pseudonym of Moma Brown, who also writes under the name of Elizabeth Ferrars) are best described as quiet and polite. The characters are usually normal middle-class British people — which is not to say they are dull: many are writers or artists or engaged in otherwise unusual professions; the women are independent and strong. But they are people to whom violence seldom happens: and when it does, they are shocked, but willingly take charge and get to the bottom of these unexpected happenings.

   Martha Crayle is a typical Ferrars heroine. Middle-aged and twice divorced, she has struggled to raise two sons while caring for an invalid aunt and running a rooming house. When the aunt dies and leaves her an unexpected legacy, she moves out all her boarders except the reserved and stem Mr. Syme (who has become her confidant and, when crime strikes, a sort of Watson) and takes up volunteer work for the National Guild for the Welfare of Unmarried Mothers.

   It is at their offices that she meets Amanda Hassall, a young pregnant woman who claims she has been deserted by her husband and impregnated by the man she is living with. Amanda does not wish to marry the baby’s father, nor does she want to put the child up for adoption as her parents have suggested. Martha takes the girl home, and a day later takes in another pregnant woman, Sandra Aspinall.

   As Mr. Syme has darkly hinted, Martha should not have given refuge to these total strangers. Before Amanda has spent two nights in the house, a murdered man turns up in a local hotel, and she is reported to have been on the scene.

   Amanda insists the victim is her estranged husband, but her parents –who appeared shortly before the body was discovered — claim the husband died in an airplane crash the year before. In addition to the parents, the boyfriends of both young women arrive, and by the Lime murder is done twice, Martha thoroughly regrets her involvement and wishes she had listened to Mr. Syme.

   The plot twists and turns (with plenty of surprises) all the way to the very end. Ferrars writes well and creates characters that are sure to enlist her readers’ sympathies. This novel is one of her best.

     ———
   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.

GYPSY WILDCAT. Universal Pictures, 1944. Maria Montez, Jon Hall, Peter Coe, Nigel Bruce, Leo Carrillo, Gale Sondergaard, Douglass Dumbrille. Screenplay: James Hogan, Gene Lewis, and James M. Cain. Director: Roy William Neill.

   Filmed in lush Technicolor, Roy William Neill’s Gypsy Wildcat stars Maria Montez and Jon Hall in a fun escapist adventure movie. Montez, as the Gypsy girl Carla, captivates the audience with her beauty and charm. Jon Hall, as Michael, provides the story with a male love interest for our exotic leading lady.

   In terms of plot, Gypsy Wildcat may ultimately not add up to all that much. Falsely accused of murdering Count Orso, Michael (Hall) shacks up with a Gypsy caravan. On his trail is the mischievous Baron Tovar (Douglass Dumbrille) who seeks to not only capture Michael, but to marry Carla and steal her royal birthright. It’s Robin Hood, Errol Flynn type of fare and nothing that requires too much thought.

   What struck me the most was how absolutely saturated in color the movie turned out to be. Whether it is a Gypsy festival at the beginning of the film or a choreographed fight sequence, color schemes play a vital role in bringing this film to life. It makes for a highly enjoyable viewing experience. Which, of course, was the whole point of this production.

   While the ending is both way too abrupt and predictable, most of the storyline is seamless and works quite well. Of note, hardboiled writer James M. Cain is one of three writers credited with the screenplay. But don’t let that fool you. The material here is lighthearted and not even remotely noir.

   A final word. It’s long been my contention that Roy William Neill remains one of the most underappreciated directors of his era. Much like The Black Room, which I reviewed here a decade ago, Gypsy Wildcat punches well above its weight, thanks to a director who took the subject matter seriously.

BART SPICER – The Dark Light. Carney Wilde #1. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1949. Bestseller Mystery, digest-sized paperback, date?

   Carney Wilde gets hired to find a missing preacher, a Reverand Kimball of the Church of Shining Light. A church of Kimball’s own founding.

   Kimball’s gone awol, and no one seems to know where he could have gone.

   As soon as Wilde thinks he gets a lead, a church member is killed, and then another. It begins to look like anyone with any information about Kimball’s whereabouts gets erased.

   Wilde does some good, methodical detective work, has a bit of luck, and he’s able to crack the case. Of course.

   There’s nothing too special about the story. It’s a fine mystery, solved fairly. But what really makes the book good is how good a writer Bart Spicer is. His writing is sparkling clean, his metaphors innovative, and his voice is his own. There’s no tired, rote turn of phrase. All the sentences are written beautifully, and each phrase is fresh and new, in the hardboiled way we like ’em. I’m a fan.