DENNIS LEHANE – Gone Baby Gone. Patrick Kenzie & Angie Gennaro #4. William Morrow, hardcover, 1998; paperback, 1999. Reprinted several times since. Film: 2007, with Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan.

   Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are Boston PI’s.

   They get hired to try to find a missing child. The child’s mother is a wastrel, a waste, heavy drug using, sexed up, alcoholic piece of used jet trash. And neglectful to boot, constantly leaving her young child untended, sunburned at the beach, or left to rot in front of the television. Yet she wants the child back.

   Turns out the kidnapping is part of a much deeper conspiracy, and the mother was a drug mule who absconded with a couple hundred thousand dollars from some guys you better not mess with.

   And the deeper Kenzie and Gennaro dive into things, the deeper the conspiracy goes.

   The book is much longer than is my wont, clocking in at over 400 pages. But it came in #9 on the Thrilling Detective poll of the top 14 PI novels of all time — so that put it in my TBR.

   It was alright. Compelling enough to keep me flipping the pages. But it doesn’t, to my mind, rank that high as a PI novel. It’s fine for a marginally disturbing beach read. But that’s about it.

   Then again, I’m quite biased in favor of mid-century PI novels. I feel like something of the immediacy of the language, terseness, to the point-ness, joltiness, briskness, tightness, has been lost somewhere between the mid-century and now.

   I can’t quite put my finger on it. But our language has become flaccid. It’s certainly not a problem unique to Lehane — he’s better than most. I feel like it infects/inflects most of our contemporary use of language.

   And I’m no exception.

LUCAS WEBB – Eli’s Road. Doubleday, hardcover, 1971. Popular Library, paperback, no date stated.

   I recently went back to a used book store to buy the copy of Green Ice they’ve had there for years, and got distracted once again. This time by a novel called Eli’s Road,  by Lucas Webb.

   Considering the quality of this thing, I’m surprised Webb and his novel aren’t better-known. It starts off a bit awkward, but soon gets the reader involved in a first person narrative spanning ante-bellum Kansas to 1880s Wyoming.

   Webb does a remarkable job of keeping his narrator believable from the time he writes as a callow teen-ager till he ends up in stoic middle-age, quite a feat of style, and the story: Bloody Kansas, rogue mountain men, orphan girls, pro-slavers, store-keepers, abolitionists, border ruffians, emigrants, freed slaves… and the mysterious Brother Frank.

   Seek it out.

B. TRAVEN – The Bridge in the Jungle. Serialized in Vorwärts in 1927 (in German) and published in an extended book form in 1929. Knopf, 1st US edition, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted several times. Originally written as a short story and intended to be the title piece of Traven’s short story collection The Collected Works of B. Traven: The Bridge in the Jungle.  Available online at the Internet Archive website. Film: United Artists, 1971.

   Told in the first person, our American narrator is hunting alligators in the Mexican jungles. Makeshift native settlements dot the river banks. In one such settlement, our narrator runs into an acquaintance of his, another gringo named ‘Sleigh’ who has married into the community. He decides to stay for a couple of nights.

   There is a pump station there that runs water to the railroads. The pump station attendant has the status of local royalty as he has the finest of huts, an actual mattress to sleep on, and pots and pans to cook with. Once in a while the pump station attendant brings in beer and soda and some musicians for a party and sells the beer and soda for a little profit. Such a party is scheduled for tonight.

   For the party, a young man returns for the weekend from the Texas oil fields to flaunt his riches, sow his oats, and play with his little brother Carlosito who worships him. He comes bearing gifts: a beautiful shining black pair of shoes for Carlosito. The first shoes the child has ever had. He is tremendously excited to put them on and show them off — yet for a boy who has never worn shoes before, the shoes prove to be a bit of an encumbrance to the boy’s exuberant comings and goings and jumping around.

   Between the pump station and the settlement is a rickety old bridge without any railings, the 12 foot deep river running beneath.

   The party begins, and villagers from all around descend upon the pump station, hazarding the bridge in the pitch jungle darkness. The mood is festive, there’s laughter, giggling girls, coy boys, dancing and gossip.

   And then Carlosito disappears.

   At first the disappearance and the mother’s fears are dismissed: it’s only been half an hour; boys will hide and run away — but they always come back. But as the hours pass and the boy fails to return, the mother’s fears turn more and more hysterical, while the grounds for her hysteria become harder and harder to dismiss.

   It’s a powerful story of the depths of maternal love and grief and the interpersonal scope of tribal motherhood where every mother in the village shares trepidation and grief, joining the aggrieved ​in union, in unison, giving everything they have despite their squalor, for no other reason than love.

   I liked it. Maybe not as much as I loved Death Ship (which to me is one of the best books ever). Nor was there the breadth of adventure and psychopathology of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, nor the Death Ship-lite sarcastic voice of The Cotton Pickers. But there is a purity here presenting the native maternal heritage where one rightly wonders whether civilization has wrought a more or less civilized humanity as we struggle through love and loss, together and alone.

ON THE WATERFRONT. Columbia, 1954. With Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden. Lee J. Cobb and Rod Steiger. Written by Budd Schulberg. Directed by Elia Kazan.

THE HARDER THEY FALL. Columbia, 1956. With Humphrey Bogart, Rod Steiger, and Jan Sterling. Written by Budd Schulberg. Directed by Mark Robson.

   I should not be surprised that two movies from the same studio, with the same writer, should feel so similar, but I watched these back-to-back, and it was like having the same dream twice.

   Both films involve corrupt bosses enriching themselves by exploiting simple (and simple-minded) men who make a living by brute strength. In Waterfront it’s longshoremen jumping to the tune of Lee J. Cobb as Union Boss Johnny Friendly; Fall offers Rod Steiger as Nick Benko, Fight Promoter, but they’re both basically the same character: venal, ruthless, and possessed of a sublime indifference to the pain of others.

   But the similarities don’t end there — they’re just beginning. Early on in both films, someone who crosses the bosses meets an untimely and violent end. More to the point of the narrative, both feature a protagonist who works for the Boss, uneasy about things he sees going on, but compromised by his position in the organization:

   Waterfront’s Terry Malloy (Brando) has a brother (Rod Steiger) in Cobbs’s inner circle; in Fall, Bogart is a well-respected (but out-of-work) sportswriter, helping Steiger (again) build up odds on an oversized Bum, but both men are essentially hiring themselves out as tools to enable the exploitation of others. And in both movies, the drama builds as our heroes begin to ask themselves “What kind of tool am I?”

   Sorry about that. But the question never is satisfactorily answered in either film. In both cases, they manufacture dramatic crises to provide a “Movie-Ending” that rings palpably false — in my ears, anyway. Schulberg and Kazan don’t explain how Terry Molloy, shunned for squealing and avoided for safety’s sake one minute, becomes the rallying point for the dock workers after he gets his ass whupped by Cobb’s goons. But the ending of Fall is even worse than that, with Bogart sitting down at his typewriter to do an exposé of “The Boxing Racket.”

   I hasten to add that these unsatisfactory (to me) finales come late in the films, too late to spoil a couple of very watchable movies. On the Waterfront is an acknowledged classic, and The Harder They Fall is an underrated gem. Maybe not a spectacular coda to a career like Bogart’s but not bad at all.

   I want to say something about the acting. Waterfront was Brando’s sixth film, and by now he was comfortable on the screen, but still visibly hard-working. He’s also surrounded by actors from the same school where he learned his craft, and the interplay between them is like watching a well-oiled machine operating perfectly.

   But I find the thesping in Harder more fun to watch. Rod Steiger attacks his part with real method-madness: animated, powerful, and vigorously phony; his performance is fascinating to watch, but obviously a performance.

   Bogart, in his seventy-fifth and final film, simply walks across the screen and dominates it effortlessly with the assurance of an established Star. Acting never enters into it; he simply is Bogart. And the clash of the two actors and the two styles brings a riveting intensity to their roles that is no less impressive for having probably been inadvertent.

A TRAGEDY AT MIDNIGHT. Republic Pictures, 1942) John Howard, Margaret Lindsey, Keye Luke, Mona Barrie, Roscoe Karns, Miles Mande.r Screenplay by Isabel Dawn, based on a story by Hal Hudson and Sam Duncan. Directed by Joseph Santley. Currently streaming on YouTube (added below, but see Comment #1).

   Radio detective Greg Sherman (John Howard) is roundly disliked by the police who he harasses with his weekly program solving crimes while they twiddle their thumbs, so when he wakes up to find a murdered woman in the twin bed in the borrowed apartment of Dr. and Mrs. Wilton (Miles Mander and Mona Barrie) where his new wife Beth (Margaret Lindsey) should be, while their apartment across the hall is being painted, it looks bad, and when Lt. Cassidy (Roscoe Karns) shows up and arrests him, it looks even worse.

   Luckily for Sherman, with a little help from his wife and houseboy Ah Foo (Keye Luke), he quickly escapes, but now he is on the run not even knowing the name of the murder victim.

   Obviously modeled on The Thin Man, and despite the stereotyped Chinese houseboy who speaks in pidgin English (but luckily has brains and knows judo) this film from Republic Pictures moves fast and has a decent mystery at its heart, as Sherman and his attractive wife discover the dead woman had two names, two apartments, and two lovers, one a club owning gangster.

   As murder and circumstance eliminates their best suspects Sherman races to find the solution and manage to make the deadline for his next broadcast where he has to produce the killer.

   Howard and Lindsey make for an attractive minor substitute for William Powell and Myrna Loy and have some natural presence playing off of each other. The suspects are the usual lot. and there are a number of decent red herrings along the way before Howard closes in on the real killer on the air.

   Of course there are holes in the plot. and you probably don’t want to think too much about it, but the solution is satisfying and one of those “that was obvious” endings that aren’t really obvious until you actually hear them explained.

   The whole stereotyped Chinese houseboy business is. as you might suspect, offensive, but frankly Luke seems to be playing it tongue ’n cheek and brings such energy to the part, it’s hard to dwell on the injustice. He was an actor who was invariably better than the material he was given. It’s hard to imagine why the pidgin English though, considering his years as the thoroughly American Jimmie Chan. He’s at least integral to the plot and not just comedy relief.

   There’s nothing new here, but it is done with energy and at least some thought to the mystery and not merely the comedy and quick patter. As a B, it does exactly what it aims to, which is worth commending in any film.
   

ACCUSED OF MURDER. Republic Pictures, 1956. David Brian, Vera Ralston, Sidney Blackmer, Virginia Grey, Warren Stevens, Lee Van Cleef, Barry Kelley, Elisha Cook Jr. Screenplay by W. R. Burnett, based on his novel, Vanity Row. Director: Joseph Kane. Currently available on YouTube (see below). (The book is reviewed by Dan Stumpf here.)

   Time was starting to run out for Republic Pictures when this film was produced, and as it so happened, the end of Vera (Hruba) Ralston’s motion picture career was close to ending as well. Republic lasted until 1959, while Miss Ralston’s last appearance on film was in 1958. That their fortunes were so long tied together is due to one fact: she was the longtime protege of Republic Pictures studio head Herbert J. Yates, whose last year on top was also — you guessed it — 1958.

   Her acting abilities, never regarded very highly, were probably adequate for most of the generally low budget films she was in, and over the years, there were 27 of them. In Accused of Murder she’s a night club singer who’s suspected of murdering a high-flying attorney (Sidney Blackmer) in debt to the mob, but luckily for her, the homicide lieutenant in charge of case (David Brian) finds himself falling in love with her, and he’s the only person standing between her and a life in prison.

   Definitely not believing her story is Brian’s second-in-command, a very young Lee Van Cleef, whose way of carrying himself reminded me a lot of Lee Marvin, lean and lanky and in so smooth control of himself.

   There’s more to the story than this, including a scar-faced hit man (Warren Stevens) whom we see being paid for killing Blackmer, and a would-be blackmailer, a dime-a-dance girl (Virginia Grey) who saw Stevens at the scene of the crime. There are a few twists to the tale, some of them quite clever, or there would have been if we (the viewer) hadn’t been shown too much in the beginning, and yet not enough to stop us from puzzling over whatever it was that wasn’t shown. Speaking entirely for myself, you understand.

   Adequate, therefore, but all around? Only adequate. There’s no other word that might apply, unless it was mediocre, and truthfully, Accused of Murder is a step above that. It’s a small step, but a step, nonetheless.

UPDATE: This review was first posted on this blog on 17 November 2011. The reason for its revival is that it’s the second listing (alphabetically) in Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of FILM NOIR, by Arthur Lyons (Da Capo Press, 2000). I’m in the process of working my way through it, one movie at a time. The first nine Comments that follow are from its earlier posting.
   

(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Spring 2024. Issue #65. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 36 pages (including covers). Cover image: Stuart Palmer’s The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree.

   It goes without saying that Old-Time Detection is an indispensable repository of information for the devotee of classic detective fiction, mixing the old with the new in this particular literary genre; and who better than Arthur Vidro to curate it.

   First up is a short 1976 EQMM interview with Stanley Ellin: “The problem here was to get an ending which was right.”

   Next, Charles Shibuk continues his Paperback Revolution from 1974: “As I write this, 1973 is slowly dissolving into a hopeful new year, and 1973 has certainly not been a good one — especially in the reprint field.” Shibuk notes reissues from Margery Allingham (“an extremely erratic performer, but she seems to be her best in the short form”); James M. Cain (“hardboiled prose by a master of the genre”); Agatha Christie (“presents Poirot as a Nero Wolfe imitator”); Carter Dickson/John Dickson Carr (“exploits in farce and detection”); Dick Francis (“a superb work”); R. Austin Freeman (“the creator of Dr. Thorndyke was one of the giants in this field”); Jacques Futrelle (“they [his stories] still retain their freshness and devilish ingenuity today”); Frank Gruber (“a fast and funny romp”); John D. MacDonald (“the patented brand of MacDonald philosophy, which this reader could live without”); Ngaio Marsh (“not among Marsh’s best work”); Rex Stout (“one of Stout’s better early novels”); and Trevanian (“overpraised”).

   Dr. John Curran, the foremost Christie expert extant, sadly traces the damage committed by meddlesome Hollywood and its even more heavily politicized ugly twin, the BBC, when adapting Agatha’s Murder Is Easy (a.k.a. Easy To Kill) and looks forward apprehensively to an upcoming “adaptation” of Towards Zero. Curran hits the truth button on why Agatha Christie’s “entire back catalogue is still in print”: “It is because she stuck to writing what she knew she could write: clever, entertaining whodunits. . . she rarely, if ever, weighed down her stories with discussion of religion or politics.”

   The second part of Francis M. Nevins’s article about Erle Stanley Gardner has a wealth of information concerning ESG’s middle period (including the two largely unknown prototypes of Perry Mason and Della Street) and his first Mason novels, featuring a far different character than most readers and TV viewers are accustomed to (“The Mason of these novels is a tiger in the social Darwinian jungle . . .”). And there’s more to come.

   In 1958 Julian Symons compiled a heavily annotated list of what he regarded as the “100 Best Crime Stories,” starting with William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), and running up to 1957. Those familiar with Symons’stastes in detective fiction won’t be surprised at some of his choices, but it’s heartening to see that he didn’t overlook Freeman, Futrelle, Van Dine, and EQ, among deserving others.

   Pietro De Palma offers up this issue’s fiction piece, “A Double Locked Room” (6 pages): “In the seafront office of the Bari Police Station, two men were discussing this fresh case, which seemed less a police matter than a matter for an escapologist.”

   From the mid-80s we have Jon L. Breen’s in-depth reviews of three contemporary novels: Max Allan Collins’s Kill Your Darlings (1984: “excellent dialogue, characterization, and mystery plot”); Robert J. Randisi’s Full Contact (1984: “a well-crafted and quick-paced story”); and Reginald Hill’s A Clubbable Woman (1970, first U. S. publication 1984: “one of the outstanding firsts in detective fiction history”).

   Editor Arthur Vidro shares his thoughts about the (usually) benign madness associated with book collecting, which sometimes becomes uncontrollable at auctions, and his own personal “game plan.”

   From a 1979 issue of The Armchair Detective we delve once more into “The Non-Fiction World of Edward D. Hoch,” as he reminisces about “Growing Up with Ellery Queen” (“I think I wanted to be a writer even then”).

   When he reviewed Doug Greene’s recently published John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995), Michael Dirda rightly entitled it “The Houdini of the Mystery” (“Carr excels in his plotting and narrative pacing, in the rush of unfathomable, seemingly unconnected clues . . . reading a writer like Carr is being reminded that good fiction doesn’t require richly beautiful sentences or complex psychological probing . . .”).

   Arthur Vidro returns with two concise reviews: Agatha Christie’s By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968: “her enthusiasm comes through in the prose”) and Stuart Palmer’s The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933: “The fourth outing for Hildegarde Withers takes her to California”).

   Letters from OTD-ers and a fiendish puzzle wrap up what we’ve come to expect, a quality issue of Old-Time Detection full of good stuff.

      ____

   Subscription information:

   Published three times a year: spring, summer, and autumn. – Sample copy: $6.00 in U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else. – One-year U.S.: $18.00. – One-year overseas: $40.00 (or 25 pounds sterling or 30 euros). – Payment: Checks payable to Arthur Vidro, or cash from any nation, or U.S. postage stamps or PayPal. – Mailing address: Arthur Vidro, editor, Old-Time Detection, 2 Ellery Street, Claremont, New Hampshire 03743.

Web address: vidro@myfairpoint.net

BART SPICER – The Golden Door. Carney Wilde #3. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1951. Bantam #975, paperback, 1952.

   “The Golden Door” are the last three words on the Statue of Liberty:

         “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
         I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

   Carney Wilde has been able to sustain his private eye business through a retainer as security detail for the fancy Jonas Department Store in downtown Philadelphia. It’s been a pretty cushy gig — but lately it seems like there’s some insider theft going on. So Wilde has to earn his keep.

   While working on the case, the son of the Jonas Department Store mogul asks for help with an ‘unrelated issue’. The so-called unrelated issue has to do with stolen files from his non-profit agency “Future Americans”. “Future Americans” helps displaced eastern European Jewish survivors of WWII immigrate to the U.S., frequently by promising jobs with the Jonas Department Store. The missing files contain sensitive personal information of prospective immigrants.

   Of course, if you’ve read any detective stories before you know there’s no such thing as an unrelated case.

   The store thief ends up dead, and he’s not the only one. Turns out some of the “Future Americans” think the ‘golden door’ ought to be melted down and cashed in. And that’s pretty much just what they try to do.

   Carney Wilde is a terrific hardboiled detective and Bart Spicer exercises great narrative control. Despite seeming coincidences tying everything together, I never doubted the credibility of the story. No plodder, he’s a skillful plotter. Everything fits; you get a satisfying denouement.

   So I’ll say it again. I have no idea why the Carney Wilde books are out of print. They’re exciting vintage hardboiled detective novels. Some of the best I’ve read by anyone not named Chandler or Hammett.
   

      The Carney Wilde series —

The Dark Light (1949)
Blues For the Prince (1950)
The Golden Door (1951)
Black Sheep, Run (1951)
The Long Green (1952)
The Taming of Carney Wilde (1954)
Exit, Running (1959)

ACCOMPLICE. Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), 1946. Richard Arlen (Simon Lash), Veda Ann Borg, Tom Dugan, Michael Brandon, Marjorie Manners, Earle Hodgins, Francis Ford. Based on the novel Simon Lash, Private Detective, by Frank Gruber. Director: Walter Colmes.

   Sometimes it doesn’t pay to get what you’ve been wishing for, even if you’ve been looking for it for a long time. Case in point: This movie, based on a private eye yarn by a long time master of pulp fiction, Frank Gruber.

   Gruber also had a hand in on the screenplay, but I have to be honest. This is one of the worst assembled detective movies I’ve had the occasion to watch in a long time. It’s a jumbled up mess, one put together by a gang of ham-fisted amateurs, or so it seems.

   Luckily it’s only 68 minutes long, and at that it felt a whole lot longer. PRC didn’t have a lot of money to splurge on their productions, and even so you get the feeling that they cut the budget on Accomplice by thirty percent about halfway through to save it for the next film out of their hopper.

   Another problem, perhaps, is that they tried to film the book fairly closely, but that’s only a guess, not having read the book in over 50 years, but that’s what it feels like. There’s simply too much story, which goes hither and yon and there, and in 68 minutes, there’s not nearly enough time to stitch the pieces of a nicely complicated plot together so the seams don’t show, and badly.

   But as for the story, since you are asking, it starts out in fine fashion. Simon Lash (a mid-career but still dashing Richard Arlen) is a private eye, and not only that, one of my favorite kinds of private eyes, a book collecting PI, mostly non-fiction about the West and how it was Won. He also has an assistant named Eddie (Tom Dugan) who seems to do a lot of the heavy lifting around the office.

   He’s hired in Accomplice by brash blonde Joyce Bonniwell (played to perfection by brash blonde Veda Ann Borg) to find her husband, a bank manager who suffers from periodic bouts of amnesia. (We’ve heard that before, and so has Simon Lash.) What makes things hinky here is that Joyce once dumped Simon at the altar.

   So far, so good. What comes next is fast and furious. There is a mistress on the side (red-headed, as if you could tell in a black and white movie), a mink ranch, a missing bank president who’s been seen with a mysterious brunette, a body found with its head blown off, and — skipping a whole lot — a Castle in the desert being used for nefarious purposes, lorded over by Francis Ford (brother of John Ford, a fact which is of course totally irrelevant to the rest of this paragraph).

   There things come to a flashy and violent end. I had stopped caring about 30 minutes earlier, but the ending, I’d have to admit, is nearly worth waiting for. Almost, but not quite.
   

MICHAEL & JOHN BRUNAS and TOM WEAVER – Universal Horrors.The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931-1946. McFarland, hardcover, 1990, softcover, 2017.

   Fans of that sort of thing should drop what they’re doing and rush out in the street to buy this book. Handsomely produced, exhaustive but never tedious, this is the survey of those wonderful (and sometimes wonderfully inept) Horror Films put out from 1931 to 1946 by the Horror Studio.

   There are fascinating bits of information on budgets and stock footage, intelligent interviews with the surviving principals and minor character actors, and even an occasional bit of critical depth.

   It’s all too rare that a book manages not to insult the reader’s intelligence even while seriously discussing films that do, but Universal Horrors actually manages to chart its way from the giddy heights of Bride of Frankenstein   and The Black Cat all the way down to things like Night in Paradise and The Brute Man without putting a foot wrong.

   Of course, there are a few mistakes in critical Judgement, by which I mean that the authors don’t always agree with me. I have always been struck by the contrast in Universal Monster Movies between the bland, unengaging “heroes” of these films and the intriguing treatment of the hairy outcasts who are supposed to be the Bad Guys.

   I’ve reflected that kids watched these things in movie houses, where they were re-released right up to the early 50s, then stayed up late a night to catch them on television through the 60s, and I’ve always wondered if this was how the Hippies got their start.

   Weaver and the Brunases don’t bring this up — perhaps just as well — nor do they cite the bit of Invisible Man stock footage that was always [any good Sherlockian’s] favorite bit of Holmesian Trivia, but they do manage to run to earth just about every other bit of stock footage, retreaded script and reused actor from almost a hundred movies that most film historians wouldn’t give the time of day.

   And they do it in a way that is almost compulsively readable. I recommend this one highly.