WILLIAM P. McGIVERN – The Caper of the Golden Bulls. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1966. Pocket, paperback, 1967. Film: Embassy Pictures, 1967, with Stephen Boyd, Yvette Mimieux, Giovanna Ralli, Walter Slezak. Screenplay by Edward Waters and David Moessinger. Directed by Russell Rouse.

   
   For retired bank robber and cracksman Peter Churchman — aka the Black Dove to Scotland Yard, Interpol, and the Suretè — living in splendid retirement in Spain in contentment with his lazy almost lackadaisical lifestyle as a well to do expatriate is paradise enough. It is the comfortable reward for an intelligent and carefully managed life of crime ended before the inevitable happened.

   Neither greedy nor foolish, Peter settled for just enough. He has always settled for just enough, and that is about to prove a problem because life requires more commitment than just enough.

   He might have known that pipers have to be paid eventually, and his piper is about to present the bill in the form of caper Churchman wants no part of: Grace, a beautiful married woman he won’t commit to, and blackmail that leaves him no choice in a violent and deadly game.

   Every year the running of the bulls is held in Pamplona in Northern Spain. The ritual attracts crowds of American and European pleasure and thrill seekers made a sort of literary wine soaked pilgrimage by Ernest Hemingway’s lost generation novel The Sun Also Rises (aka Fiesta) during which drunken revelers either run the streets of Pamplona in front of the wild bulls ending in the ring where they play at amateur matadors before the real bull fights begin or drink and watch the fools get mauled.

   For the week of the fiesta Pamplona’s population balloons, tourists get run down by the bulls and overcharged by the residents and the locals take in a good portion of their yearly income. Along the way is a genuine outpouring of faith and tradition for the religious holiday the week marks.

   The running of the bulls coincides with a religious procession through the streets of the city displaying valuable religious art and brought to the small city for the Festival of San Fermin, the whole reason for the running of the bulls in the first place.

   Part of the Fiesta is the statue of the Virgin and her diadem of jewels on display during the procession to the church, including treasures from all over Spain and Catholic Europe including the Golden bulls of Avignon sent by the Pope himself. A prize all briefly held in a bank vault in Pamplona.

   Which is why the Black Dove’s old partners in crime François Morel and Peter’s former mistress Angela have shown up with evidence that ties Peter to an old crime and with plans to crack the vault of the bank in Pamplona where the treasure will be kept.

   And if things weren’t bad enough Peter’s married mistress Grace is pregnant, by her husband, and pressuring Peter to make things permanent and his good friend Antonio chief of the local policia is too nosy for anyone’s good.

   Something has to give, and it may just be the Black Dove is well on its way to having its wings clipped before he can survive Morel and Angela and their crew, much less the police and Grace.

   William P. McGivern hardly needs introduction. Best known for his tough suspense and crime novels like The Big Heat, Rogue Cop, and The Odds Against Tomorrow (all also classic films) he also wrote international intrigue, and in his early career had been a staple of the Science Fiction pulps. Late in his career he even wrote a mainstream bestseller or two. Caper is a quick book to read, around 60,000 words, 175 slender pages in paperback, but packs a tremendous amount of story and character development, as well as details about the intricacy of cracking a bank vault, much less outwitting blackmailers with murderous intent.

   As should be expected with McGivern, the suspense is taut, the pace fast, the people involving, and the climax satisfying, all anyone can ask of a caper novel.

   It was a natural to be developed for the big screen with Stephen Boyd well cast as Peter, Yvette Mimieux as Grace (who plays a bigger role ultimately than Peter can expect), and Walter Slezak as Antonio the local police chief. It’s not a great film, but it does manage to capture the characters, adults in emotion and action for once, and the suspense of the novel as well as the color and confusion of the crowded streets of the Festival of San Fermin.

   The book on the other hand is a small gem, a delightful caper novel that manages to be both tough and honest about crime and criminals and give the reader a charming likable if not entirely morally upright protagonist, somewhere between one of Eric Ambler’s able criminals and a more realistic modern Raffles.

   One of the great pleasures of the book is just how much McGivern sketches in with a few deft strokes without turning the plot into a travelogue or padding it out with overwritten asides. It is more picaresque than hard-boiled, more To Catch a Thief than Richard Stark’s Parker, an appetizer and not a meal, but sometimes you are in the mood for a well chosen nosh and not a seven course feast.

   This one should both whet and satisfy your appetite.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – Death in Donegal Bay. PI Brock (the Rock) Callahan #10. Walker & Co., hardcover, 1984. Charter, paperback, 1987.

   William Campbell Gault sold his first short story to a pulp magazine in 1936; nearly half a century later, he is still writing fiction of the same high quality that has marked his long and prolific career. He has published more than 300 short stories and novelettes — mystery, fantasy, science fiction, sports — and some sixty novels, half of which are mystery/suspense and half of which are juvenile sports books.

   Gault’s most enduring fictional creation is ex-L.A. Rams football player turned private eye Brock Callahan, hero of eleven novels thus far. The first in the series, Ring Around Rosa, was published in 1955; six others followed it over the next eight years. Gault abandoned detective fiction in 1963 to concentrate on the more lucrative juvenile market, and did not return to a life of fictional crime until the early 1980s, when the juvenile vein had been played out. Callahan was given a new life as well, in a pair of paperback originals published by the short-lived Raven House; one of these, The Cana Diversion, was the recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for the Best Paperback Original of 1982.

   Death in Donegal Bay is Gault’s first hardcover mystery in more than twenty years, an even better novel than Cana Diversion and as good as the best of the early Callahans, Day of the Ram (1956), The Convertible Hearse (1957), and County Kill (1962). Callahan, thanks to a substantial inheritance, is now married to his longtime girlfriend, Jan, an interior decorator, and semi-retired in the beach community of San Valdesto (Santa Barbara, where Gault himself lives).

   But he’s bored and has kept a hand in the detective business by grooming a protege, young Corey Raleigh. When Corey is hired for a surveillance job by con man named Alan Arthur Baker, Callahan worries that the kid has gotten in over his head and therefore sets out to do some snooping on his own. Among the people he encounters in the swanky former artists· colony of Donegal Bay are a conniving real-estate salesman, a couple of kids who run a bait shop, an ex-pug bar owner, a secretive former maid, a beautiful woman with a shady past, and an eccentric millionaire who lives in a medieval castle complete with moat and drawbridge.

   The murder of a vagrant opens up a Pandora’s box of blackmail, narcotics, infidelity, and more homicide before Callahan, with Corey’s help, untangles it all and arrives at the solution.

   Rich in incident, written with wry humor and sharp observation, peopled with believable characters, this is William Campbell Gault at his best.

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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.

SUSPENSE “Fire Burn, and Cauldron Bubble.” CBS Radio, April 6, 1943. Number 36 of 945 episodes. Writer: John Dickson Carr.

   One of the favorite programs of  old time radio fans is most certainly the famous Suspense series, which was also probably one or the longest running as well, It was on CBS radio more or less continuously from July 17, 1942, until the final episode, broadcast on September 30, 1962. For most of the early years, up until 1948, the man· who was both producer and director was William Spier, who certainly did his best to live up to the program’s motto of always withholding the final solution “until the last possible moment.”

   During the first two or three years’ run, many of the scripts were written by none other than John Dickson Carr, doubtlessly the most famous practitioner of the Locked Room Mystery, with more than 70 published novels to his credit. Most of them contain some form of impossible puzzle challenge to the reader, and if I’m a fair sample, most of his millions of readers usually failed the test.

   My own personal favorite or the Carr/Suspense collaborations was first heard on April 6, 1943, and is entitled “Fire Burn, and Cauldron Bubble”, The star was. (then) famous movie actor Paul Lukas, who played a professional magician responsible for the special effects in putting on a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (e.g. Banquo’s ghost) in London’s famed Drury Lane Theatre.

   During the first act a former actress is killed in a theater box guarded by two loyal servants, in full view of 3000 unsuspecting people. No shot from a silenced revolver from  across the theater, no dagger thrown from a neighboring box. She died of a stab wound through the right eye, and there’s no sign of the weapon anywhere.

   Some clues; She’s too vain to wear glasses. The box underneath was paid tor, but it  remained unoccupied. And a man sneaked in and out of an aisle seat on the ground floor during the performance ·

   Besides the drama of the crime and its solution, what makes this particular program most memorable to me, at least, is that in the background the play is going on at the same time: the screeching of the witches and the loud, rumbling claps of thunder, always at the  most appropriate moment.

   Unfortunately, there is one question that just might remain in your mind even after the murderer’s identity is discovered. Why on earth was such a far-fetched method of killing the lady required? Don’t ask.

JONATHAN GASH – Firefly Gadroon. Lovejoy #6. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1984. Penguin, US, paperback, 1985. Published previously by Collins, UK, 1982.

   Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy series is one you will either adore or viscerally dislike.

   Lovejoy is immersed in the world he loves — that of antiques, legitimate or fake. (His own run heavily to the latter.) For Lovejoy, antiques are everything — well, nearly everything. His secondary passion is women. Readers who share Lovejoy’s first fascination will be rewarded with descriptions of, for example, hammering a reverse silver gadroon (oval fluting) or identifying Shibayama knife handles.

   In auction scenes, Gash takes his fans into the English village world of off-the-wall bids, “miffs,” “nerks,” “groats,” those who “pong” or “do a beano,” and the “cackhanded,” “narked,” or “sussed.”

   Lovejoy is charming and not above bending the law or the truth in the pursuit of a true antique. The romantic escapades and amours of this sprightly rogue are a delight. But for readers with no interest in or prior knowledge of antiques, the unexplained trade slang and the unabating discussion of old treasures can be overwhelming and tedious.

    Firefly Gadroon is the sixth in the series. Lovejoy’s trouble begins — as it often does — when he spots a luscious woman with beautiful legs at an auction. The object of his admiration “frogs” (gets) a small Japanese box he’s had his eye on, and not only will she not sell it to him, she doesn’t even appear to know its value.

   Why, then, does she insist on keeping it? That question leads Lovejoy into encounters with killers, police, international smugglers, and, of course, still more beautiful women. Lovejoy is at his roguish best in this adventure, and the background is as colorful as ever.

   The first Lovejoy novel, The Judas Pair (1977), involves a hunt for a lost pair of sinister dueling pistols. In The Vatican Rip (1982), the dealer undertakes the tricky task of stealing a Chippendale table from the Vatican. And in Pear\hanger (1985), Lovejoy tries his hand at locating a missing person — and ends up suspected of murder.

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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.

ANDREW GARVE – The Lester Affair. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1974. Published previously by Collins,UK, hardcover, 1974.

   Among Garve’s other interests is a keen one in boating and the sea, and this is one of his best novels dealing with that theme. James Lester, Britain’s Progressive party candidate, seems well on his way to becoming prime minister when a strange thing happens: A young woman, Shirley Holt, claims that she and Jim Lester met during a holiday; that they bathed nude together on a deserted beach; that she went aboard his boat to spend the night; and that during the night they had a sexual relationship.

   Well, all right, such things happen. And apparently no harm has been done. After all, at the time, and presently, Lester was single-a widower actually. But (and here comes the intriguing Garve puzzle) Lester himself not only denies that such a thing ever happened, he denies even knowing the woman.

   Needless to say, claims and counterclaims take over the election headlines. Why. Lester supporters wonder, would Jim tum his back on this woman? She is able to supply a very convincing account of that night, including details she seemingly would not have known otherwise, and the topaz ring she claims she lost on the boat is recovered from one of its drains. Still, Lester sticks to his story, and begins to lose his lead in the election polls.

   This complex mystery is told from a number of points of view of people investigating the incident. And, as is often the case with Garve’s stories, interest is sustained throughout without a single death or even the threat of death. The resolution is sure to surprise and satisfy the reader.

   Garve also displays his knowledge of the sea to good effect in The Megstone Plot (1957) and A Hero for Leanda (1959). Other equally fine adventures are The Cuckoo Line Affair (1953), which concerns a son’s fight to clear his father of a shameful accusation; Boomerang (1970), which is set in Australia; and The Case of Robert Quarry ( 1972), an excellent depiction of the eternal triangle.

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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.

ROADBLOCK. RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. Charles McGraw, Joan Dixon, Lowell Gilmore, Louis Jean Heydt, Milburn Stone. Story by Richard Landau and Daniel Mainwaring (as Geoffrey Homes). Co-screenwriter: Steve Fisher. Director: Harold Daniels.

   A hard-nosed insurance investigator falls hard for a girl, the kind of girl who wants nothing but money out of life, hardly the kind of money an insurance investigator makes, and he decides to do something about it.

   And he makes a mess of it,  especially after the girl decides it is really he she wants, not the fur coats. Joan Dixon does not seem to have had much of a Hollywood career, and I can’t see why. Her dark seductive eyes are very nearly in the Gail Russell class.

RORY CALHOUN – The Man from Padera. Major Books, paperback, 1978. Novelization of the film The Domino Kid (1957)

   Years ago, Bill Crider gave me The Man from Padera by Rory Calhoun, and it’s interesting to compare Calhoun’s writing to Errol Flynn’s [follow the link]: just as virile, a bit more violent, but not nearly so graceful.

   This is adapted from a story Calhoun wrote for a movie he starred in back in ’57. And why he waited twenty-one years to novelize it is anyone’s guess. It’s a pretty standard thing, probably a bit old-fashioned by ’78 but still fun and quite violent, with a vengeful rancher out to get the owlhoots what killed his family.

   No surprises, but I never felt like putting it down, either.

ANDREW GARVE – The Ashes of Loda. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1965. Publisher earlier by Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1965. Popular Library, US, paperback, 1966. Perennial Library, US, paperback, 1978

   Andrew Garve (a pseudonym of Paul Winterton) has produced some forty well-crafted novels of suspense. In addition to their consistent high quality, what is notable about them is their diversity, both of setting and type. Garve writes adventure, espionage, detection, and even romance with equal facility.

   His stories are set in such far-flung locales as the English countryside, Australia, Africa, France, and Ireland. His heroes are often policemen or quite ordinary men who rise to meet unusual circumstances with unusual fortitude, and often his villainous characters are so finely developed as lo win the sympathy of his readers. Garve’s readers can count on a good adventure with a tantalizing central puzzle that will keep them reading until all is resolved.

   The puzzle in The Ashes of Loda involves the past — specifically the war record — of a Polish chemist, Dr. Stefan Raczinski. Was he, as he claims, merely a survivor of the German concentration camp at Loda, or was he guilty of war crimes in that camp? The question threatens to tear apart the relationship of the two people who care most about him: his daughter, Marya, and her fiance, Lord Timothy Quainton.

   Tim, a newspaperman normally stationed in Moscow, meets Marya while on leave in London. During their courtship he discovers an old newspaper article condemning Dr. Raczinski in absentia for war crimes. Marya adamantly ref uses to believe this, but there is enough doubt in Tim’s mind to make him launch an investigation when he returns to Russia. It is an investigation that will leave him cut off from all official help-and eventually marked for death in the middle of a Russian winter.

   Garve is well acquainted with Russia and her people, since he was a foreign correspondent for the London News Chronicle in Moscow from 1942 to 1945. He puts this. knowledge to good use in this exciting story, particularly in the sequence in which Tim finds himself stranded in the countryside, trying to escape the police, foraging for the essentials, and trying to survive the deadly winter weather.

   Garve’s other novels that make use of his knowledge of Russia include Murder Through the Looking Glass (1952), The Ascent of D-13, and the The Late Bill Smith (1971).

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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.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – County Kill. PI Brock (the Rock) Callahan #6. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1962. Charter, paperback, 1988.

   PI Brock (the Rock) Callahan’s client in this case is a small boy whose father has disappeared and (unknown to him) is suspected of murdering his partner in crime. What the crime is, nobody is saying, and the San Valdesto city police seem to be overly involved.

   Note the title. San Valdesto is a town split between millionaires on one side, and poverty row on the other. Everyone is very money conscious, and it interferes with the investigation. Callahan has the right instincts, however, and eventually they pay off.

LOVE’S LABOURS LOST. Miramax, 2000. Alessandro Nivola, Alicia Silverstone, Natascha Elhone, Kenneth Branagh, Carmen Ejogo, Matthew Lillard, Adrian Lester, Emily Mortimer, Richard Briers, Geraldine McEwan, Stefania Rocca, Jimmy Yuill, Nathan Lane, Timothy Spall, Anthony O’Donnell, Daniel Hill, and Richard Clifford. Presented by Martin Scorsese and Stanley Donen. Screenplay and directed by Kenneth Branagh. Available for rent on Amazon and Apple TV.

   And now I must face an internal struggle between propriety and ease; should I slight your smarts by adding that this is based on the play by William Shakespeare (sorta) which I’m sure everyone here knows? or say nothing and perhaps be taken to task for slighting Shakespeare himself?

   My critical reputation could be at stake here, if I had any. What shall I do? Please send your comments and suggestions to Steve, as I can’t be bothered with them.

   At any rate, this is the movie that stalled out Kenneth Branagh’s career and didn’t do Shakespeare any good, either. I’ve always thought of it as a thin slice of Sheer Genius: a tribute to old musicals, the Bard, clowns, and Casablanca.

   What serves for a plot is set in or around the mid-1930s, in the Kingdom of Navarre, a largely fictitious pocket monarchy, where the King secludes himself and a few friends in a program of monastic study, just as Hitler is sweeping across Europe gobbling up nations and peoples like they was salt peanuts — a device cleverly tacked on by Branagh himself, conveyed in mock-newsreel footage (rather than mock-Shakesperean dialogue) to lend a sense of movement and urgency to a paper-thin story.

   Because as you might have expected, Love comes pounding on the castle moat when four total babe princesses come a-callin’, ostensibly and sensibly to negotiate some sort of treaty with the King of France, but actually to sing & dance.

   I’ll admit it comes as a bit of a shock when the players suddenly shuck their Elizabethan prose for the lyrics of Gershwin, Berlin and Cole Porter, but I think Branagh carried it off wonderfully. The numbers are well-chosen, boldly imagined, and presented with enthusiasm that almost-but-not-quite makes up for the amateurish status of the performers.

   In fact, Branagh covers rather well for the deficit of terpsichorean talent in his cast with deft camera trickery. Not the enervating step-cut-step editing of Chicago, where the camera does all the dancing, but cleverly coordinated set-up and follow-through moves of camera and dancer that combine to impart grace and harmony to actors who sing like Astaire and dance like Crosby.

   In case you’re not familiar with the story of Love’s Labours Lost,  I won’t spoil it for you. Much. I’ll just say that a sudden reversal late in the game sends the whole thing spinning off in an unexpected direction. And Branagh swings the bat and hits a touchdown. Or scores a strike. Or whatever it is they call it in Polo.

   I joke, but in fact, Branagh provides us with one of the most moving endings I’ve ever seen on film. Fast-moving, poignant, and suffused with Romance — or perhaps it’s Love. An incredible montage of images that carry the Bard’s tale to a surprising and hugely satisfying conclusion.

   Which did no good at all. LLL was what is usually and charitably called a Box-Office Disaster, though possibly stronger terms are called for here. Statistically speaking, the movie-going public stayed away at a rate of 97% plus-or-minus 6% — which means that this film might have been shunned by movie-goers either dead or not born yet. Branagh had a three-picture deal going here, but the studio lawyers must have decided it’d be cheaper to be sued than make another movie like this.

   Of course, I really really like Love’s Labours Lost, and once again I find myself waiting for Fashion to catch up with me.