STUART KAMINSKY – Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1977. Penguin, paperback, 1979.

    “Someone had murdered a Munchkin.” So begins the latest case of Toby Peters, last seen helping Errol Flynn out of a nasty blackmail scheme. This time it’s a frightened Judy Garland who demands that MGM allow our lowly Hollywood private eye to handle the affair.

    Name-dropping is again as much of a nuisance as it is of nostalgia value, but rather amusing is the assistance of a rather famous mystery writer who happens to be in Hollywood at the time. More importantly, by the time he’s cracked the case, this time the raffish Toby Peters has begun to become a little more real himself, in a way equivalent to catching a glimpse of an actual person hidden behind the glitter and glamor visible up front on the silver screen.

    Next up, the Marx Brothers.

Rating:   B minus.

Bibliographic Notes:   This was the second of twenty-four Toby Peters novels published between 1977 and 2004, a very nice run by anyone’s standards. For a complete list, along with the books in four other series Kaminsky wrote, plus two standalones, go here.

JOHN FLAGG – The Persian Cat. Gold Medal #103, paperback original, 1950. Stark House Press, paperback, August 2015.

When I went to bookscans.com to find the cover image you see to the right, I discovered that this low number Gold Medal paperback is actually the first crime, detective or espionage novel that that company ever published. I’m not sure if that means anything more than something of historical interest, and then only to diehard collectors, but it is, I think, worth pointing out.

“John Flagg,” a pen name of John Gearon, wrote eight novels for Gold Medal, five of them with a character named Hart Muldoon, a former OSS agent whose past-World War II adventures took him all over the globe. I’ve not read any of them, but if Persian Cat is an example, I probably should do something about that.

The protagonist in Cat is not Muldoon, but a gent cut from the same cloth, another ex-OSS agent named Gil Denby who as the story begins is at extremely loose ends in Paris. The year is not stated, but it could be either 1949 or 50 as easily as not. He’s hired by a member of the former French Resistance to track down and bring to justice a woman who betrayed her husband and two others to the Vichy government during the war.

She’s in Tehran now, the companion of fabulously wealthy dealer in oil wells and other money-making commodities, including investments such as buying bitcoin in the UK. Delby’s job, to bring her out of Iran and — under some pretext or another — to Algeria where she can be tried and summarily executed.

All is not what it seems, of course. It never is in the best of spy and espionage novels. There are enough sudden deaths, mix-ups and double-crosses to satisfy any aficionado’s tastes, and naturally Delby begins to wonder if Mrs. Claire Fayne not the traitor she is known to be.

Flagg seems to know his way around Tehran, circa 1950, and he is able to translate what he knows into very descriptive prose. In his hands, the city he talks about has a certain surreal feel to it, giving the central part of the story more than a little uncertainty as to the direction it will take next.

Which is a good thing. For identification purposes, Delby is given a small artifact, a seven inch Persian cat, to be used whenever needed. As it turns out (spoiler) it really isn’t used for anything but to give the story a little coherence, which it really doesn’t need. The real Persian cat of this story is rather Mrs. Fayne, who is illustrated to near perfection on the front cover.

BRENNER. “False Witness.” CBS; 6 June 1959. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Edward Binns, James Broderick. Guest Cast: Frank Overton, Kay Medford, Alan Ansara, Michael Conrad, with Dana Elcar (uncredited). Written by Loring Mandel. Director: Gerald Mayer.

   The series as a whole was reviewed here on this blog by Ted Fitzgerald almost seven years ago soon after a box set of DVDs was released. Now that I’ve watched the first episode, I’m impressed enough to want to see more.

   Ted described it as “character-driven drama about two New York City cops, Roy Brenner (Edward Binns) a veteran member of The Confidential Squad (aka Internal Affairs), and his son Ernie (James Broderick), a rookie detective,” details that for one reason or another weren’t completely nailed down in this first episode.

   This one’s about a hack assistant D.A. who wants Ernie to embellish, shall we say, his testimony against a man accused of splashing a container of lye in his wife’s eyes. No one saw the crime itself. The man says the lye was hers (in more ways than one) and she spilled it on herself.

   The D.A. guy puts all kinds of pressure on Ernie, but in the end he (spoiler) does the right thing. According to Wikipedia, the series was “filmed live,” by people who knew something about telecasting live TV. This particular episode begins with some interesting long tracking shots, and facial closeups are used to very good advantage. Skilled people were at work here.

   As for the guest cast, Kay Medford has the acting ability to make her quirky character, the victim of the attack, even more interesting than the lines she has to say, and Alan Ansara, as the cellmate of the accused assailant, sounds very much like Robin Williams to me in his exaggerated way of trying to say whatever he thinks he needs to that will earn him rewards from the police and D.A.’s office.

   What I found unusual, and the problem I alluded to above, is that there was no effort to “introduce” the characters. We do not even know who the younger Brenner is until he’s spoken to by name about ten minutes into the program. The father, Edward Binns, does not appear until there’s only two minutes to go. As he is sitting there in the courtroom awaiting the trial to begin as someone we have net seen before, the young Brenner sits next to him and calls him Dad. Presumably he has bigger roles in future episodes.

THE MAD MAGICIAN. Columbia Pictures, 1954. Vincent Price, Mary Murphy, Eva Gabor, John Emery, Donald Randolph, Lenita Lane, Patrick O’Neal, Jay Novello. Story & screenplay: Crane Wilbur. Director: John Brahm.

   If stealing ideas and pieces and pieces of various scenes from other movies were a crime, The Mad Magician would seriously be on the verge of being sent up for a ten-year stretch. Crane Wilbur, who wrote the story and screenplay also did the screenplay for House of Wax, which came out the year before, but for Warner Brothers, and probably not so coincidentally also starred Vincent Price in the leading role.

   Both films were also in 3-D, though this one is in black-and-white, while House of Wax was in color. In both films the theme is that of revenge. In both cases it is Vincent Price’s character who is wronged, but getting even is where the fun comes in, at least for the viewer, if not his victims.

   Director John Brahm, among other films, did both The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945), two films which take place in roughly the same time period as this one, or the turn of the last century, and one scene in The Mad Magician, in which Price’s character rents a room as part of the plot he is perpetrating, is more than strongly reminiscent of a similar scene in The Lodger.

   As the fledgling magician Gallico the Great, Price’s character is taken advantage of twofold, first by the owner of his contract that says that all the tricks Price creates belong to him, then by a rival magician, The Great Rinaldi, who then appropriates them to use in his own act.

   The new science of fingerprints has a great deal to do with solving the case (murder), which is investigated by Lt. Bruce (Patrick O’Neal), the boy friend of Karen Lee (Mary Murphy), Gallico’s very comely assistant, along with the mystery writer wife of the couple who own the house in which Gallico rented the room.

   It’s a complicated story, and maybe it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but where this movie goes off in another direction from the others I’ve mentioned, is its arch sense of humor and fun behind the mayhem. I wish they’d showed the audience how the “Lady and Buzzsaw” trick in real time, though. The “Crematorium” is just as deadly, one assumes, but if they’d wanted to have made a sequel, à la all those Freddy movies, I really think they could have.

A MAN ALONE. Republic Pictures, 1955. Ray Milland, Mary Murphy, Ward Bond, Raymond Burr, Arthur Space, Lee Van Cleef, Alan Hale Jr. Director: Ray Milland.

   What begins as a remarkably bleak and gritty Western noir eventually undergoes a remarkable metamorphosis and transforms into a rather standard melodrama – a Eugene O’Neill family drama in the American Southwest, as it were.

   And it’s a darn shame, for A Man Alone, a movie both starring and directed by Ray Milland, certainly had the potential to be a much more offbeat, rough around the edges, Western than it turns out to be. This is especially true given that Ward Bond, Raymond Burr, and Lee Van Cleef all portray men engaged in a criminal enterprise that is suffocating a small Arizona town.

   The movie begins as bleak as can be, with scant dialogue and the sound of desert winds. Gunfighter Wes Steele (Milland) is literally a man alone in the hot, dusty Arizona desert.

   After stumbling upon the site of a brutal stagecoach massacre, he makes his way to Mesa where he first engages in a shootout with the local deputy and then holes up in the town bank.

   It’s there that he learns that a man named Stanley who runs the Bank of Mesa (Burr) and his henchman, Clanton (Van Cleef) were behind the massacre. In noir fashion, however, it is Steele who is blamed for the crime, leading him to seek refuge in the home of Nadine Corrigan (Mary Murphy).

   Problem is: Nadine’s dad (Bond) is not just overprotective. He’s also the local sheriff and a corrupt one at that. He has his reasons, of course. (Don’t they all?)

   But this promising setup ultimately doesn’t pay off. What could have ended up as Western noir classic instead turns into instead standard Hollywood fare, complete with a relatively upbeat ending.

   Wes Steele may be a gunfighter (Spoiler Alert), but he ends up defeating the bad guys and getting the girl. Perhaps had he ended up as an elegiac, tragic figure like Gregory Peck’s world-weary gunslinger, Jimmy Ringo, in Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950), A Man Alone would be more widely known film than it is.

ROBERT COLBY – In a Vanishing Room. Ace Double D-505; paperback original; 1st printing, 1961. Published back-to-back with The Surfside Caper, by Louis Trimble.

   Put an ordinary guy in a decidedly non-ordinary and dangerous situation and see how he does. That’s the basic premise, and while I’d have to tell you that the book itself is quite forgettable, an out-of-work advertising account executive named Paul Norris does all right for himself, mostly by finally getting himself out of the funk he’s been in for several months.

   There is a MacGuffin involved, a shipping crate filled with something valuable, but what exactly, no one will tell him. In the process of tracking it down, making his way from Miami to New York City to San Diego, he finds caught up in an adventure filled with multiple shady characters, beautiful women and double crosses galore. Who’s on who’s side? You’d need a scorecard to know for sure.

   It’s a minor story with no frills in the telling, and short, at only 127 pages long, but its action-packed content zooms right along with the speed of how fast the reader can turn the pages. One good gimmick is a room in a basement in which Norris and a female companion have a deadly encounter with a killer. When they go back with the police the next day, not only is there is not a room in the basement, there is not even a basement.

   Try that one on for size the next time you want to go adventuring.

MIDNIGHT AT MADAME TUSSAUD’S. Paramount British Pictures, UK, 1936. Released in the US as Midnight at the Wax Museum. Charles Carew, James Oliver, Lucille Lisle, Kim Peacock, Patrick Barr, William Hartnell, Bernard Miles. Written by J. Steven Edwards, Roger MacDougall and Kim Peacock. Directed by George Pearson.

   Wax Museums exert a sinister fascination in the movies that they somehow never achieve (for me at least) in real life. Every Wax Museum I’ve ever visited seemed unconvincing and a bit dull, except for the Boris Karloff Wax Museum in Niagara Falls, which was so tacky as to cause alarm.

   Maybe it has something to do with the camerawork, or the nature of Film itself, but in the movies (the best of them anyway) the dullness of Wax Museums gives way to a creepy sub-reality that comes across in evocative backgrounds and creepy denizens — Lionel Atwill, Vincent Price and Martin Kosleck (in The Frozen Ghost) — who seem like extensions of their nightmare background.

   The creepy denizen in Midnight/Tussaud’s is Bernard Miles (no, I never heard of him either.) and he conveys the mood of malevolent nerdiness perfectly as he escorts World-famous explorer Sir James Cheyne (Carewe) and a group of notables about the London Tourist Trap for the unveiling of Cheyne’s wax replica. Then he pretty much drops out of the movie, worse luck, as we get a bit of exposition; Cheyne’s broker-friend (Oliver) is oddly evasive about some funds supposedly coming due, and Cheyne himself is not at all happy about the suitor (Peacock, who also worked on the screenplay) courting his daughter (Lisle).

   So when the Creepy Curator dares the Intrepid Explorer to spend a night alone in the Museum, we can tell something interesting is going to develop, and it does, quickly, because this thing’s only an hour long. In fact it may me take longer to tell it than the movie did.

   Briefly, Lisle gets engaged to the unworthy Peacock, a brash reporter (Patrick Barr) finds out and thinks it just a tidbit for the Society page but soon senses something beneath the surface. Turns out Peacock is already married, and he and the broker-friend are in dastardly cahoots to milk Carewe and his daughter of their wealth — or as much of it as they can get, anyway.

   By now you’ve figured out that the brash reporter and the daughter start up a tentative and playful romance (you DID see that coming, didn’t you?) which bungs up the schemes of our plotters, and they decide the best move is to send the Explorer on a trip he never planned. And since he’ll be conveniently isolated in the Wax Museum that very night….

   â€¦And this is where the film lets us down. Murder in a Wax Museum should be a thing filled with odd camera angles, creepy shadows, menacing-but-still figures, an occasional furtive movement or gleaming eye among the dummies, and all that sort of thing. But we get none of that here. Not even a hint. What we get instead is an interminable stretch of the murderer skulking through the dark, intercut with even-less-terminable shots of Carewe reading the newspaper — how’s that for thrills?

   The big problem with this whole sequence is that we never get a sense of their relative positions; the killer slinks, lurks and prowls, Carewe does the crossword and lights a cigar, but we never know if the villain is getting closer or just wandering around in some other movie. Bad show, that.

   All this is intercut with our brash reporter confronting the absolute bounder/fiancé, a fist-fight that looks as though the players were trying hard not to hurt each other, and a desperate race to get to the Museum in time to save Carewe… and it all fails to generate the least bit of suspense because the Museum scenes look like they could go on indefinitely.

   The end result is a movie that coulda been a contender — but it ain’t. I should add though that the brash reporter’s comic-relief assistant is played by William Hartnell — who went on to fame, or at least cult status, as DOCTOR WHO.

STEPHEN GREENLEAF – Blood Type. John Marshall Tanner #8. Morrow, hardcover, 1992. Bantam Crimeline, paperback, 1993.

   It’s no news that I consider Stephen Greenleaf one of the better of the current PI writers. As I’ve remarked elsewhere about Jeremiah Healy, I know Greenleaf is going to give me at worst a decently written book of a type I enjoy, featuring a character I like.

   One of Tanner’s`drinking friends, who works as a member of the emergency medical services, is found dead in an alley, apparently a suicide by drug overdose. He has recently been pouring out his heart to Tanner about the impending break-up of his marriage, about to be caused by the pursuit of his torch singer wife by a local tycoon. Tanner does not believe his friend would have killed himself (sound familiar?), and begins to investigate. The case of course proves complex, with links to a possible blood supply scandal and the victim’s troubled past.

   As always, Greenleaf has things to say about society, and people, and the way we live our lives. Usually, they are not intrusive; here, at times I felt I could see the soapbox. I didn’t feel that the plot was well integrated, either — or perhaps it just didn’t grab me enough to make me pay attention.

   All told, this was the least impressive entry in the series in some time. Still, it was a John Marshall Tanner book by Stephen Greenleaf, and if you’re a fan of same, that’s enough.

PAUL KRUGER – A Bullet for a Blonde. Vince Latimer #1. Dell First Edition A160; paperback original; 1st printing, June 1958.

   Although author Paul Kruger has ten entries in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, this is the only one of them in which PI Vince Latimer is the detective of record. The setting is unknown. Al lists it as the “US West,” and that’s my best guess, too.

   There’s no particular reason why Latimer couldn’t have made a second appearance. Sometimes the nature of a case makes it all but certain it’s one and done, but that’s not at all true here. It’s just an ordinary PI novel, with most if not all of the standard ingredients, well written but for the most part easily forgotten once you’re done.

   As the title suggests, the victim is a blonde, one who shows up drunk on Latimer’s office doorstep one night, telling him someone is going to kill her. It sounds like a vodka dream to him, so he bundles her into his car and drops her off at her home. Next day he gets a call from her sister. She wants to hire Latimer. She thinks her sister is having an affair with her husband. Latimer goes to check out the trysting place, and there he finds the girl dead.

   The only aspect of the mystery that raises it above standard fare is the ending, which is a doozie. Latimer builds a solid case against two people before settling on a third, which is the correct one. It isn’t easy writing a detective novel in which this happens. The drawback being that it takes lots and lots of last chapter explanation to untangle all of the threads of the plot. I didn’t mind, but your standard PI novel reader might.

   One other thing. “Paul Kruger” was in reality Roberta Elizabeth Sebenthall, 1917-1979, and if it means anything to you, you could have fooled me. The writing is told in first person, with all of the conventional leering at women and all of their curves in the right places, and while the one bedroom scene stays outside the bedroom, it does happen, as does one other that’s even more offstage, but when you think about it later, you have to realize that… well, I’ll have to be content in saying that men do not have a monopoly on PI novels in which hardboiledness (if that’s a word) comes into play in one fashion or another.

THE REPORTER: “Extension Seven.” CBS, 60m, 25 September 1964 (Season 1, Episode 1). Cast: Harry Guardino (Danny Taylor), Gary Merrill (Lou Sheldon). Guest Cast: Rip Torn, Shirley Knight. Series created by Jerome Weidman. Writer-director: Tom Gries.

   This was from all reports, a highly ambitious TV series, but it evidently didn’t catch on withe viewing public, since it ended in December the same year, with only 13 episodes aired.

   This is the only episode I’ve been able to see. Others don’t seem to be around, or else I haven’t been looking hard enough. But based on this sample of size one, it was obvious that a lot of effort and talent was put into it. Harry Guardino plays a columnist/reporter for the New York Globe, while Gary Merrill is his city editor. I was reminded of an old-time radio show starring Frank Lovejoy called Night Beat, in which he comes across all kind of crooks and other people with problems, all grist for his column for a Chicago newspaper, but the basic idea I’m sure has been around for a long time.

   According to Wikipedia, all kinds of big names (or soon-to-be big names) showed up in the 13 episodes: Nick Adams, Eddie Albert, Edward Asner, Dyan Cannon, Richard Conte, Herb Edelman, James Farentino, Anne Francis, Frank Gifford, Arthur Hill, Shirley Knight, Jack Lord, Archie Moore, Simon Oakland, Warren Oates, Claude Rains, Paul Richards, Robert Ryan, Pippa Scott, William Shatner, Barry Sullivan, Roy Thinnes, Daniel J. Travanti, Franchot Tone, Rip Torn, Jessica Walter, and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.

   In this the first episode, Rip Torn plays a nobody of a man who is encouraged by one of Danny Taylor’s columns to not not stand idly by when he sees a woman being seriously harassed by a gang of juvenile delinquents. For this he gets a knife in the stomach, and he blames Danny Taylor, whom he calls to vent his frustration and feelings.

   Problem is, he will die if he doesn’t get medical attention, but he doesn’t know where he has found refuge, only the extension number on the phone. The hoods are also looking for him so they can finish off the job, which provides exactly the kind of suspense that makes a 60 minute program, including commercials, pass very quickly. On the other end of the line, while Danny is trying to have the call traced, is Shirley Knight, a copy girl for the paper and another lost soul, and a second kind of connection is made.

   The script does get kind of preachy at times, especially when Merrill reminds Guardino that his job is not to feel guilty for getting the victim to risk his life on the basis of his newspaper column — Guardino seems to have been around long enough to not need a rookie reporter’s pep talk — but all in all, this was a top notch production that did what it was supposed too, keep the viewer’s eyes on the screen at all times.