JAMES McKIMMEY – Winner Take All. Dell First Edition A185, paperback original, 1959; cover art by Darcy. Stark House Press, trade paperback, December 2017 (published in combination with Perfect Victim).

   Now let’s suppose. A little bit of make believe. You’re alone in San Francisco. You’re a field engineer, and you’ve just returned from Saudi Arabia. There’s a knock on the door of your door. You say, what the hell, and you decide to open it. The man standing there looks almost exactly like you.

   He’s your twin brother, he says. It’s a long story, but he convinces you. And he has a proposition for you. He owes a crooked gambler in Reno $100,000, and all he’s been able to come up with is $60,000. What he wants you to do (for a $10,000 fee) is pose yourself off as him and offer the gambler half of what he owes. He’s a coward, he says, and you’ve been around. You’re tough and can handle yourself.

   Question: Would you take him up on the offer? You can use the money. Would you say yes?

   Well, Mark Steele does just that, and thereby the tale. No, of course it doesn’t go well. In fact he goes as badly as you might think, even if you were writing the story.

   James McKimmey, who was actually the one who wrote it, not you or I, was awfully good with dialogue, and the action-packed finale, while even more far-fetched than the opening couple of chapters, goes by in a flurry of turning pages. Or at least it did for me.

   In a interview with the author by Allan Guthrie in 2004, published as the introduction to the Stark House edition, McKimmey said he wrote the book (50,00 words) in ten days. If I were to tell you that it reads like it, I absolutely also need to add that I do not men that in a bad way. This was a joy to read, knots in the logic and all.

NOTORIOUS. RKO Radio Pictures, 1946. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern. Screenplay: Ben Hecht. Director: Alfred Hitchcock.

      A lot of ink has been spilled on interpreting Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, the romantic thriller starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Some critics have posited that the film is primarily a romance in which love, despite numerous obstacles, ultimately triumphs at the end; others that it belongs in that every amorphous cinematic category known as “film noir.”

   Others have focused less on the film’s plot and more on its signature visual style and the manner by which Hitchcock creates and refines the very language of cinema. The one through which he is able to tell the story through both the placement of inanimate objects and the imposition of meaning to them.

   All of the above, I think, are valid ways in which to interpret Notorious. I personally have my doubts whether this particular RKO release should be considered a proper film noir. Yes, it’s on the more cynical side of things and its subject matter – in which the U.S. government through the persona of one of its agents, T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant), essentially prostitutes Alicia, a deeply damaged young woman and the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy (Ingrid Bergman), persuading her to infiltrate a group of Nazis in postwar Brazil – is obviously less pure than many of the morale boosting films put out by the major studios during the Second World War. But it’s a far cry from the cynical and gritty lower budget crime dramas that are now rightly considered films noir.

   For me, the film is essentially about losing and winning, both on the personal level (romance) and on the political (thriller). It’s the universalism of this subject matter that makes it compelling to viewers seventy some odd years after it first premiered. The plot, as Hitchcock himself agreed, boils down to a man who is forced to choose between his emotions (his love for Bergman’s character) and his duty to his country.

   More significantly, it’s about Devlin’s desire to win at nearly any cost. He wants to win Alicia over his competitor, the Nazi industrialist (Claude Rains) whom she has been spying on for Uncle Sam. He wants his country to win over the Nazis even after the war has ended. There’s rarely a moment in the film in which Devlin ceases to want to win on both a romantic and political level. There is no “dark night of the soul” for Devlin in which he questions his ultimate desires and goals.

   If we are to see Alicia as the film’s main character – and I think she is – then the question becomes whether Notorious is fundamentally all that different from other motion pictures about women who want to change their lives. As the film’s title indicates, she’s notorious. She drinks and has numerous love affairs with men. Devlin knows this. Yet he’s deeply conflicted about it, which is why he is alternatively madly in love with her and deeply cruel to her.

   By the end, she thinks that she has changed, that she has found her white knight in Devlin who carries her down the stairs and out of harm’s way. But no one realistically thinks that this is a fairy tale ending. Once the mission is complete and Devlin realizes he has won against the Nazi villain in two ways, will he want to stick around to “make things work,” as modern family therapists would say, or will he be poised for the next assignment?

   I should note that I recently watched the brand new Criterion Collection blu-ray release of this Hitchcock classic. There are some truly worthwhile supplemental features including an illuminating 2009 documentary about the film in which the political context at the time of the film’s writing and release is discussed by leading film critics and historians.

   Of note is the fact that soon after the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, Hitchcock directed a short documentary film about the horrors discovered there. This was one of his main completed projects before working directing Notorious, which of course features Nazi industrialists who have relocated to South America after the war’s end.

   In 1946, the Cold War hadn’t yet made West Germany a vital ally to the United States so Nazis, rather than the communists, were still the villains. It’s doubtful whether such a film would have been of as much interest to studio executives had screenwriter Ben Hecht and Hitchcock pitched the film in 1950.

M. D. LAKE – Amends for Murder. Peggy O’Neill #1. Avon, paperback original, November 1989.

   A frustrating book. There aren’t many detectives who are female campus cops, and the idea produces lots of good possibilities, most of which are only hinted at in this book. Peggy O’Neill is her name, and she’s the one who finds the body of a murdered professor of English.

   Determined to show the city police a thing or two, Peggy then uncovers some of the dead man’s more unseemly past. What bothered me was the way she knew things before she (and the reader) was told, and the way the killer was caught, by sheer accident.

   The Peggy O’Neill series —

1. Amends for Murder (1989)
2. Cold Comfort (1990)
3. Poisoned Ivy (1992)
4. A Gift for Murder (1992)
5. Murder by Mail (1993)
6. Once upon a Crime (1995)
7. Grave Choices (1995)
8. Flirting with Death (1996)
9. Midsummer Malice (1997)
10. Death Calls the Tune (1999)

DOROTHY B. HUGHES – The Fallen Sparrow. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1942. Paperback editions include: Dell #31, mapback edition, 1943 or 1944; Bantam, 1970/1979; Carroll & Graf, 1988.

THE FALLEN SPARROW. RKO, 1943. John Garfield, Maureen O’Hara, Walter Slezak, Patricia Morison, John Banner, John Miljan, Hugh Beaumont. Screenplay by Warren Duff. Directed by Richard Wallace.

   I’ve long been impressed by Dorothy B. Hughes’ ability to put the reader into the head of her protagonists while writing in the third person. In a Lonely Place featured a murderous sociopath; here it’s a paranoid who really is being persecuted, but in both cases we follow a narrative in which we’re not always quite sure of what is actually happening to the central character . Or if we can trust that he’s reading it right

   Sparrow opens two years before the story proper starts. Kit McKitrick, young, rich and idealistic, joined the International Brigade to fight Facism in Spain. As things fell apart he snatched some valuable relics from a looter, then spent two year in a prison cell being tortured to give up their whereabouts. His most vivid memory of that time is the periodic visits of a man he never saw… a limping man from Berlin, whose arrival always brought on new and more painful torment.

   Then we switch to New York City in Wartime, with Kit returned to his Park Avenue crowd, thanks to an escape engineered (he thinks) by a longtime cop-pal who plunged to his death from a window while Kit was recuperating out West. The papers say it was accident or suicide, Kit knows it was murder.

   This forms the springboard for a perfectly crafted tale of murder and subversion among the Smart Set, as Kit’s mission of detection becomes a journey of discovery that uncovers some troubling truths about the people he once called friends – and about himself.

   Hughes builds suspense with some clever twists: Kit starts hearing the limping man from Berlin here in New York — or does he? Then he learns that his captors engineered his “escape” from Spain as a ploy to get him to lead them to the relics. Or did they? And suddenly, in his mind (and ours?) he is as much hunter as hunted.

   When RKO filmed this the next year they wisely did it in early-noir style, with a few nods to The Maltese Falcon (1941) spiced up with expressionist lighting and oppressive camera angles. This being wartime, there are a couple of patriotic speeches about Why We Fight, but by and large the emphasis is on McKitrcick’s fragile sanity.

   Producer Robert Fellows (Hondo, The Screaming Mimi, Ring of Fear, etc.) casts this perfectly, with a trio of femmes fatales that includes Maureen O’Hara (icily coiffed and made up in an Audrey Totter look) Patricia Morision and Martha O’Driscoll. John Banner, Erford Gage and Hugh Beaumont skulk around nicely in the background under the sinister supervision of Walter Slezak as a wheelchair-bound (or is he?) aristocrat with an interest in torture and the Borgias, chewing the scenery with voracious relish.

   And best of all, there’s John Garfield, that edgiest of leading men, as the half-crazy hero of the piece. Nobody could convey angst like Garfield, and he sinks into the role wonderfully, veering from manic energy to desperation with a tic of the cheek. He even seems to sweat on cue!

   Scenarist Warren Duff (who produced Out of the Past) streamlines Hughes’ book quite well, shortcutting past some of the novel’s digressions and wisely letting the actors convey their characters’ complexities. The result is a film that brings the book to life and makes it pure Cinema — and a fun movie to watch.

  MURDER AT 3 AM Renown Pictures, UK, 1953; Ellis Films, US, 1955. Dennis Price (Inspector Peter Lawton), Peggy Evans, Rex Garner, Philip Saville, Leonard Sharp. Director: Francis Searle.

   Save for a trickle of recognition for Dennis Price, the leading man in this low budget British semi-thriller, the cast of Murder at 3 am was totally unknown to me. I think you may have had to be there — England in the early 1950s — for any of them to have made a lasting impression on you.

   Not that they didn’t do a professional job of ii. The budget may have been small and the story riddled with clichés, but there’s nothing in this film that you can lay any criticism of the cast to.

   The last of a series of robberies of well-to-do women, their money and jewelry stolen from them at the doorsteps as they arrive home at night, has ended in the death of one of them, putting a lot of pressure on Scotland Yard in general and Inspector Peter Lawton in particular.

   What the robberies have had in common is that they all took place at 3 am, and the women were all coming home alone in cabs from various night clubs in the area. What the new fiancé of the inspector’s sister, a budding mystery writer, discovers, however, is that the first letters of the names of the night clubs spell out P-L-A-Y-…, which suggests where the killer may strike next.

   We are traipsing on Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen territory here. Unfortunately additional clues start pointing to the fiancé himself as the one responsible for the crimes. I spoke of clichés up there earlier. The denouement is one of the oldest in the books.

   But what can I tell you? I both noted the limitations of the story and then ignored them, and I enjoyed the movie anyway.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Lost, Strayed and Stolen.” Lester Leith #44. Novelette. Detective Fiction Weekly, 24 February 1934. Never reprinted, though I’d welcome being corrected on this.

   It might be possible to characterize Lester Leith as a private eye, except for one small detail, or maybe two. He never had a PI license, and as far as I know, his only client was himself. What he realty is is difficult to describe. What he does is scour the newspapers for details on crimes that have been committed and tries to find a way to cut himself in on the proceeds.

   He is so successful at this that there is no “tries” about it. The police do not take his activities lightly. They think he is a crook himself, although they have never been able to prove it.

   To this end, however, they have inserted one of their men, a chap named Beaver, into Lester Leith’s household in the guise of his personal man servant. Leith calls him Scuttle, and of course Leith is fully aware that Scuttle is a easily fooled spy for the equally inept Sgt. Ackley of the police department.

   Which is where half the fun of reading the Leith stories comes in. He simply delights in teasing both Scuttle and Ackley along, giving them just enough information to get them going in one direction while off he goes in the other. The other half of the fun is watching Leith do exactly that, which in this case involves setting up a totally bogus Citizens’ Committee on Civics Efficiency, complete with stationery, buttons and badges, although Leith himself is the only member.

   Goal: to obtain a valuable diamond necklace that the husband of a well-known society woman claims was stolen from him. With the use of an exact but worthless replica and the hiring of a young woman living down the hall from him who is low on funds, Leith manages to get both the police and the couple whose necklace was stolen both totally confused and bamboozled, and badly, to the total delight of the reader.

   I thoroughly enjoyed this one, from beginning to end.

BLACK RAINBOW. Miramax, 1989. Rosanna Arquette, Jason Robards, Tom Hulce. Screenwriter-director: Mike Hodges.

   A father and daughter pair make a meager living traveling from town to town setting up shows in local churches as clairvoyants and preying on their audiences’ desires to make contact with loved ones on the other side. Martha Travis (Rosanna Arquette) is very effective at this. Dressed all n white, she is able to assure everyone who has lost someone close to them that they are happy where they are now and that all is well with them.

   It is all a fraud, of course.

   Until, that is, the spirits she is in contact with begin not to be dead yet. Even more, in her visions, she can even see (and can describe in detail) the manner of their passing, including as it turns out, the murder of a would-be whistle blower at a nearby chemical plant. Even more, she claims she saw who the hitman is.

   When a local reporter (Tom Hulce) gets wind of this, skeptical as he is, the story gets into the newspaper, and thinking there just might be something to it, the owner of the plant puts his hitman back to work again.

   The story of Martha, the reporter, and her alcoholic father (Jason Robards) is all that’s of interest here. The outside criminal element that Martha accidentally eavesdrops upon, that’s pretty much by the numbers. Martha, a lovely young woman in her early 20s (I’m guessing) is not the virginal gateway to the other end of the rainbow as her role is in church. Far from it, as the reporter soon learns. And besides these new abilities, she is now also beginning to realize how much her father stole her life from her.

   Forget the hit man, and keep your eyes on Rosanna Arquette’s performance. I found it mesmerizing, especially toward the end when she chastises her audience for being relying on their belief in the happiness that awaits them once they’re gone. If we knew for sure that life is lived only once, she suggests, perhaps we’d try to be better people while we’re here. The ending is quite remarkable, too, as the film verges even further into the supernatural and the unknown.

   Is this film a diamond in the rough? No, not really, but you may find it parts of it as fascinating to watch as I did.

IRWIN SHAW – Nightwork. Delacorte Press, hardcover, 1975. Dell, paperback, 1976. Further reprint editions exist.

   Doug Grimes is a pilot with a stutter and not much of a future when he discovers he has a rare eye disease that won’t blind him, but certainly grounds him. Now he works as night man at the St. Augustine hotel, a dangerous enough job, but at thirty-three, though fit and smart, Doug Grimes is headed nowhere fast.

   Men at crisis, any sort of crisis, middle age, ennui, marriage, family, divorce, business, are the stuff of many books and stories by Irwin Shaw, the bestselling story teller whose fiction from The Young Lions to Rich Man Poor Man chronicled life in the latter half of the 20th Century, primarily for the male half of the population in novels like Two Weeks In Another Town, Evening in Byzantium, Top of the Hill, and gem perfect stories like “Tip on a Dead Jockey” — and those are just some of the ones made into movies.

   Few writers did it half as well as Shaw, with half the grace or style, and because his stories covered the whole of life, once in a while crime played into that. In Nightwork he chose to do something a bit lighter and more playful, and it should come as no surprise that he did so with panache.

   It begins, not surprisingly, with a woman. A woman who shows up at Doug’s desk in the St. Augustine on a cold January night to inform him there is the body of a naked old man upstairs. Beside him is a cardboard tube Doug decides to hide from the police, and inside the cardboard tube is $100,000 dollars in ones.

   And being at sixes and sevens, Doug does what almost anyone in a Shaw novel might do, he quits his job, leaves town, gets a passport in a hurry with a help of friend he used to ski with, and gets the hell out of Dodge headed for Switzerland and the skiing, but not until he discovers the manager of the St. Augustine is in the hospital after two men roughed him up for no reason.

   And it is there, in St. Moritz, he meets Miles Fabian, and the game is on.

   Nightwork, I should mention, is a novel and not a thriller or caper. However much it flirts with the conventions of the genre, it is not about plot half so much as character, about a sort of late coming of age for the hero, and the magic brought into his life by the fabulous and not entirely scrupulous, Miles Fabian. Shaw is a much different writer, but this may remind you of some of the lighter novels of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.

   Nightwork is a delight, smart, playful, real, human, and yet bubbly as good champagne with the kick of a Rye chaser. It is a heartfelt novel, one to read if you are in a sour mood or down on the world, Shaw’s idea of an old fashioned good read, and frankly mine too. As Shaw has his hero comment near the end of the book; “There’s nothing like a good deed for shining in a naughty world.”

    Nightwork is a good deed in a naughty world.

Q & A. TriStar, 1990. Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Armand Assante, Patrick O’Neal, Jenny Lumet. Based on th ebook by Edwin Torres. Screenplay and director: Sidney Lumet.

   Long after you’ve forgotten the labyrinthian plot of Q & A, you will remember Nick Nolte. In Sidney Lumet’s gritty film, Nolte’s character isn’t so much an actor as he is a force of nature. Brutal, strong, domineering, and aggressive are just several words to describe NYPD Lieutenant Mike Brennan. A man so devoted to his career that he seems to have no identity beyond it, Brennan is not just a blatant racist and homophobe.

   He’s a dangerous killer, a man who has been so thoroughly corrupted that, at some level, he no longer knows who exactly he is supposed to answer to. Is it the corrupt lawyer in the DA’s office who has dirt on him? Is it the Mafia boss whose dirty work he is willing to do, if it means murdering a Puerto Rican drug dealer, a man no one in respectable society is going to miss anyway?

   When Brennan starts feeling the heat from Assistant DA Reilly (Timothy Hutton), he becomes unhinged with rage. Willing to do next to anything for the sake of self-preservation, Brennan embarks upon a brutal murder spree that takes him from the mean streets of Harlem to sunny San Juan. In his sights is drug lord Bobby Texador (Armand Assante), a stereotypical bad guy with a conscience, who is now living with Reilly’s former flame (Jenny Lumet).

   While the first half of the movie is quite compelling, the latter hour ends up getting bogged down in multiple plot threads that become somewhat difficult to follow. Everything eventually ties up together, but in such a manner that makes one realize that certain scenes either weren’t absolutely necessary to make the film work (think: the love triangle between Hutton, Assante, and Lumet) or went on too long.

   It is after all the scenes with Nolte that makes this lesser known Lumet feature worth watching. Apparently, he gained forty pounds for the role, believing that his character needed to be a physically imposing presence. It was a good decision. Nolte’s Mike Brennan belongs in the pantheon of cinematic corrupt cops. He’s that memorable a character. Loud, vulgar, and brash, he’s terrifying to the two detectives tasked with investigating him. For good reason.

FACE OF A FUGITIVE. Columbia, 1959. Fred MacMurray, Lin McCarthy, Dorothy Green, Alan Baxter and James Coburn. Screenplay by David T Chantler and Daniel B Ullman, based on the short story “Long Gone” by Peter Dawson (Zane Grey’s Western Magazine, March 1950). Directed by Paul Wendkos.

   In a decade supposedly marked by conformity, and in a genre supposedly bound up in cliché, I’m surprised sometimes by how many off-beat, idiosyncratic and just plain weird westerns came out of the 1950s: Terror in a Small Town, 40 Guns, A Day of Fury, Ride Lonesome…. I could go on and on, but then I’d be going on and on.

   Face of a Fugitive may not as bizarre as some of the others, but it’s sufficiently off-beat and well-made to stay in the memory. Or this memory, anyway.

   Face opens with Fred MacMurray as an affable outlaw being escorted to jail by a Deputy unequal to the task. In the first few minutes Fred overpowers him and is making his escape when his younger brother (Ron Hayes) shows up, kills the deputy, and is himself mortally wounded in the shoot-out.

   Now wanted for murder, Fred buries his brother by sewing him in a mail sack and dumping the body in a river. Then he insinuates himself into the closest town, passing as a traveling businessman, feigning acquaintance with the locals, and looking for some way to split the scene before Wanted Posters show up with his picture on them — in 24 hours.

   MacMurray is in fine form here. In the years before Disney and “My Three Sons” his persona was bluff and likeable bit not always trustworthy. Check him out in The Texas Rangers, Double Indemnity, The Apartment and others to see what I mean. Here he uses both sides of his acting face as the outlaw on the run masquerading as a respectable citizen, and he does it quite well, befriending the local barber, horse trader, store clerk, and sheriff, but always with an eye out for the main chance.

   Of course it’s not that simple. Nor is the Sheriff, whose deputies have the town bottled up pending the arrival of the posters. Always the smoothie, Fred wangles himself a job as a Deputy — only to find himself embroiled with the Sheriff in a range was against local cattle baron Alan Baxter, and his henchman James Coburn.

   The writers handle all this quite capably, setting up the situation, ratcheting up the tension, and pausing for some truly affecting moments when Fred sees them fish his brother’s body from the river and later watches him lowered into an unmarked grave. They also flesh out the minor characters, particularly Coburn: lithe and lethal, but essentially a cowboy, not a killer.

   Back in the day, director Paul Wendkos made a splashy debut with The Burglar (1957) then retreated into television and the Gidget movies, until finally overtaken by obscurity. Still early in his career here, he imparts a sense of pace and humanity to the proceedings, particularly in a slam-bang run-and-jump shoot-out in a ghost town, making the most of the settings and Coburn’s athleticism vs. Fred’s stoic efficiency. And he caps it all with a line (which should have been the final line) I will remember for some time.

   This is a film to enjoy—and come back to.