BILL CRIDER – Winning Can Be Murder. Dan Rhodes #8. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1996. Worldwide, paperback, 2000.

   This is my favorite of Bill’s series, and it’s a sin and a shame that no one is doing them in paperback now. Other people try to do small town Southwestern cop novels and some do pretty good, but nobody does them as well as Bill.

   Do you know what small-town Texas tragedy is? It’s having an assistant coach murdered just when the local high school football team is about to make the playoffs for the first time in ages. Do you know what pressure is? It’s what Sheriff Dan Rhodes feels from every citizen of the surrounding territory above the age of five (and a few below it) to solve this crime and get it out of the way so folks can get back to worrying about really important matters-like a football game.

   I don’t have any first-hand experience with small-town high school football these days, so I can’t say whether Bill nailed it present-day or not; I can say that it it was that way when I experienced it, and I could smell the dust and hear the cheers again when I read his descriptions.

   Aside from Bill’s always smooth and easy-to-read prose, that’s what l enjoy most about the books — the feeling that these are real people in real places, acting the way people in those places act. Well, up to a point, anyway.

   The Rhodes books will never b5e huge sellers, because they aren’t  grim and bloody enough to attract the body-count crowd, nor on the other hand a female lead who can tumble “engagingly” into peril, save the police from their incompetence, and give you a to-die-for recipe in the process.

   They are nevertheless thoroughly entertaining and very readable, and it’s a damned shame more people don’t know about them.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Exploits of the Patent Leather Kid.  Crippen & Landru Publishers, 2010. Edited and introduced by Bill Pronzini. 13 stories.

   When most people hear the name Erle Stanley Gardner, they immediately think of his most famous character creation, Perry Mason, but he was also an incredibly prolific pulp fiction writer. One of the characters Gardner created for the pulps was The Patent Leather Kid, an unoriginal amalgamation of Zorro, Raffles the Gentleman Thief, and The Scarlet Pimpernel.

   Gardner’s principal contribution to this style of hero — the effete, indolent society fop he pretends to be while his alter ego tirelessly fights criminals and the official authorities when necessary — was to infuse his stories with the hardboiled sensibilities of Depression Era America. Even so, Gardner never let his Patent Leather Kid’s exploits veer into sadism: The Kid was always on the side of right, and the reader knew it.

   Thanks to Doug Greene at Crippen & Landru for bringing back The Patent Leather Kid and other pulp heroes from their undeserved oblivion.

      The stories:          [All originally published in Detective Fiction Weekly.]

(1) “The Kid Stacks a Deck” (1932): A local criminal gang really has it in for The Patent Leather Kid and sets up an ambush. The Kid, meanwhile, sets out to prove that robbing a jewelry store equipped with the most up-to-date alarm systems isn’t, as the store’s owner boasts, “impossible” after all.

(2) “The Kid Passes the Sugar” (1932): Someone’s gunning for The Kid but kills the wrong person. The Kid sets a trap with a shiny platinum watch as bait and an abused wife as a means of bringing the killer to justice.

(3) “The Kid Wins a Wager” (1932): The Patent Leather Kid sets out to help a woman in trouble with her boss, only to come up against another burglar who’s quite capable of framing The Kid for his own crimes. If he’s clever enough, The Kid might be able to escape the frame — and collect a large bet in the bargain.

(4) “The Kid Throws a Stone” (1932): Somebody’s running around pretending to be The Patent Leather Kid, pulling off robberies in fancy Chryslers and making no effort to be subtle about it. The Kid must lay a trap for his doppelganger that, if successful, will not only clear him with the police but also aid a distressed damsel he’s never met.

(5) “The Kid Makes a Bid” (1933): After several attempts at robbing a jewelry store, a thief apparently succeeds, taking some stones and cash with him and leaving two of the store’s assistants hog-tied with ropes and handcuffs. The Kid’s suspicions are aroused by the way the crime was committed, and he performs a rough “experiment” on an unscrupulous businessman, thereby thwarting two crimes simultaneously.

(6) “The Kid Muscles In” (1933): A doctor is murdered, and the prime suspect — a young man in love with the victim’s niece — can’t explain away his presence at the crime scene or his fingerprints on the murder weapon. It falls to The Patent Leather Kid to exonerate the falsely-accused in the way he knows best, breaking and entering with intent to catch the real bad guys.

(7) “The Kid Takes a Cut” (1933): An ex-con gets the blame for a jewel robbery he didn’t commit. His alibi — that a woman gave him the stones as a reward for a good deed — is, let’s be frank, flimsy at best. Only the ex-con’s wife can corroborate his story, but the police won’t believe a word of it. The Kid must contrive an elaborate scheme involving matching train schedules to prove the man innocent, for otherwise the real thieves will soon be on their merry way.

(8) “The Kid Beats the Gun” (1933):  A famous — and vastly overrated — criminologist fingers the butler of a rich couple as the one who stole valuable jewels from them. The butler finally confesses, not to the theft, but simply to following orders. The Patent Leather Kid must intervene to prevent a miscarriage of justice and experiences the triple satisfaction of exposing a fraud, deflating an egomaniac’s pomposity, and seeing an innocent man cleared.

(9) “The Kid Covers a Kill” (1933): The man often referred to as The King of the Underworld operates almost entirely with impunity, unhindered by the police. To him, the lives of his victims don’t mean very much. But when he brutally murders the sister of one of his underlings, The Patent Leather Kid gets involved — and for The King of the Underworld, that’s a very unhealthy development.

(10) “The Kid Clears a Crook” (1934): A small businessman with a criminal record tries to go straight but runs afoul of organized crime; they get him framed for a jewelry theft — enough of an injustice to attract The Kid’s indignant notice. Before it’s all over, The Kid will have fenced some hot ice, dodged numerous submachine gun bullets, and tickled a butler.

(11) “The Kid Clips a Coupon” (1934): A wealthy elderly woman has been murdered — by a tramp, according to the police — but The Kid doesn’t think so. The whole thing smacks of an inside job — a case of discovered embezzlement — and The Kid must be proactive to head off another murder, even if it means kidnapping someone himself.

(12) “The Kid Cooks a Goose” (1934): The underworld and the police have a common nemesis — and common cause to rid themselves of him — namely The Patent Leather Kid. The cops have let it be known — through unofficial channels, sub rosa, you understand — that if the criminal class terminates The Kid, they’re willing to cut the crooks some slack. When The Kid receives news of this ad hoc arrangement to bump him off, it’s without joyful enthusiasm. His characteristic response is to devise an impromptu plan that will not only clear him of a murder frame, neutralize several underworld kingpins, and save a woman’s life, but also give a guinea pig his big chance to be a crime buster.

(13) “The Kid Steals a Star” (1934): During the course of a robbery at a jewelry store, a policeman is killed and the night watchman gets the blame. It gets worse for him when he foolishly tries to skip town; actually, he’s been perfectly framed by the clever boss of a criminal gang. In order to clear the watchman and catch the crime boss in the act of swindling a jeweler, The Kid, with the able assistance of his bodyguard and an admiring telephone operator, must concoct a three-act “play” starring gangsters, gemstones, guns, and — if everything goes according to plan — a happy ending.

         Random notes:

   Unlike Sherlock Holmes, The Kid does see it as his duty to correct the deficiencies of the official police. — All of the members of the gentlemen’s club are stereotypes. — Gardner always uses the word “conservative” with negative connotations. — These stories aren’t mysteries in the traditional sense: The fun is watching The Kid improvising his way out of tight situations. — There’s a lot of 1930s gangster slang. — The reader shouldn’t try to read more than one story at a time: Gardner was clearly writing to a formula. Read one every few days to avoid tedium.

   For even more about The Patent Leather Kid, see Monte Herridge’s Mystery*File article here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=13823.

BOURBON STREET BEAT. “A Taste of Ashes.” ABC, 05 October 1959 (Season 1, Episode 1). Richard Long (Rex Randolph), Andrew Duggan (Cal Calhoun), Arlene Howell (Melody Lee Mercer), Van Williams (Kenny Madison). Guest Cast: Joanna Moore, Fredd Wayne, Karl Weber, Isobel Elsom, Jean Byron, Jean Allison. Based on the novel by Howard Browne. Director: Leslie H. Martinson. Currently streaming online here.

   When you’re a private detective and your partner is murdered, you’re obliged to do something about it. Especially when the local cop tells you it’s suicide and you know it’s not. Such is the case that Rex Randolph (Richard Long) finds himself on, taking over from the one that his partner, a chap named Jelkens, was working on.

   Randolph’s office is in New Orleans (not Chicago, as in the book), but most of the action takes place in Pelican Point, a town run by a wealthy matriarch who doesn’t want certain information made public. Blackmail is a nasty business, but the head cop doesn’t want Randolph or any of his assistance anywhere around. An older man on the force, tired of working under younger fellows, is a lot of more sympathetic, and I hope I don’t spoil anything for anybody by telling you that this older guy is named Cal Calhoun (Andrew Duggan), who by episode’s end is Randolph’s new partner.

   There is a noirish vibe in this episode – well, why not, being set in New Orleans and close environs as it is – that’s less present in contemporary stablemate Surfside 6, say, or even 77 Sunset Strip. at least this time around.

   The book is still better, though, a well-recognized masterpiece in the hardboiled/PI/noirish vein. (For Bill Pronzini’s 1001 Midnights review of the book, go here.)

PAMELA FRANKAU – Colonel Blessington. [Completed by Diana Raymond.] Bodley Head, UK, hardcover, 1968. Delacorte, US, hardcover, 1969. Dell 1378, US, paperback, 1970.

   
   And well he might. Harvey Blessington is many things to many people. To most he is a war hero, the brave Colonel Blessington, to Anthony Price he is the man who ought to replace the candidate for Parliment they both support, to actress Anita Gilroy he is object of her first love, and to her father Matthew, he is his ex-commando comrade in arms and the object of an obsessive memory a nightmare running “like a dark river underground, until he also becomes the object of fear and a mystery that remains unsolved.”

   Like quicksilver Harvey Blessington seems always changing shape, sometimes a shadow, sometimes bright as the sun, sometimes dark and strangely threatening. At the heart of Harvey Blessington is a mystery, one just beyond belief, at once revealing and impossible to believe.

   One worth men’s lives to keep hidden.

   Colonel Blessington was the final novel by British novelist Pamela Frankau, and her first suspense novel venturing into the kind of duality and uncertainty of a Graham Greene or Patrica Highsmith. Frankau grew ill and died while writing the book and her friend novelist Diana Raymond finished the book from her extensive notebooks. While the novel was recognized in its time and critically praised in both Britain and here, her death perhaps overshadowed the novel which isn’t half as well known as it once was.

   Frankau was the daughter of British literary gadabout Gilbert Frankau, who abandoned her and her mother when she was small. She went on to become a famed and critically praised novelist on her own, her some sixteen novels such as A Wreath for the Enemy, Over the Mountain, and Clothes of a King’s Son, among her better known works.

   As Matthew Gilroy finds himself hunted and hunter going to ground to uncover the enigma of Blessington, the tension ratchets up and the need to solve the mystery of Harvey Blessington a matter of life and death.

   
   Blessington is something of a tour-de-force, pulling off a twist worthy of Agatha Christie. It’s one of those books that cleverly lays the groundwork for its key revelation so you can look back and see each clue and misdirection, yet has a solution so shocking that you won’t guess it ahead of time, Blessington’s ultimate flaw “…to take people’s lives and spoil them — a love of power. A common love brought to extremes —”

   I first read Colonel Blessington when it came out back in 1968. It still holds up today, its final revelation still as stunning and chilling as it was then, its quiet shocks coming with a chill to the bone and a recognition of our own prejudices and blindness when we fail to see the obvious right in front of us and recognize the duplicitous Blessingtons in our own lives.

O. G. BENSON – Cain’s Woman. PI Max Raven #1. Dell First Edition A200, paperback original; 1st printing, 1960. Perennial Library, paperback, 1985, as Cain’s Wife.

   So I figured there’s gotta be something biblical with the Cain’s Woman thing, right? From what I can tell by googling, it looks like the biblical Cain married his twin sister. If you google ‘Cain’s Wife’, the first thing that comes up is a Wikipedia (yes, know—Wikipedia isn’t reliable; at the same time, I’m not in the mood to do serious research at on this and the results confirm my confirmation bias) entry that says:

   “According to the Book of Jubilees, Awan (also Avan or Aven, from Hebrew אָוֶן aven “vice”, “iniquity”, “potency”) was the wife and sister of Cain and the daughter of Adam and Eve.”

   So, there’s that.

   Mrs. Cain doesn’t disappoint. Vice, iniquity, potency? She’s got ’em.

   And she comes to call on our lonely detective in his lonely beat down office, wanting his help.

   The detective is Max Raven. And he’s everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be, to coin a phrase. Except for the well-dressed part.

   Mrs. Cain says she’s being blackmailed as a result of some naughty candid pictures her ex-fiancé took of her. Mr. Cain is very old and very rich and proper. And it wouldn’t do at all for him to see these photos. Would Raven please please please fetch them for her.

   And he does.

   But things aren’t what they appear to be, and Mrs. Cain is both far more and far less than she appears. She plays Raven like a fiddle, and gives him fits, til he’s fit to be tied, like sudden death. And like sudden death, it comes. Suddenly.

   The book is quite good, Raven is likable, Mrs. Cain is femme-fatale-able. Til the end, which is far too fallible for a femme fatale to be.

   That is to say, O.G. Benson plays nary a note wrong. Until the end. When his femme-fatale does something that no femme-fatale can do, nor has ever done. It’s a fatale flaw. It takes a tale that was just a step away from being as good or better than Charles Williams’s Touch of Death and ruins it. At the very last second. Like gluing a hallmark card onto Munch’s The Scream. I screamed.

   Or what’s worse. I didn’t.

   A more favorable review here: https://vinpulp.blogspot.com/2008/02/cains-woman-by-o-g-benson.html

LES ROBERTS – Collision Bend. Milan Jacovich #7. St. Martin’s. hardcover, 1996. No paperback edition.

   You know by now that I think Les Roberts is one of the better and certainly one of the more underrated PI writers around today.  It appears that he’s decided to let his Saxon series languish and concentrate on Cleveland PI Milan Jacovich, and that suits me just fine. Les gives really good Cleveland.

   Milan Jacovich encounters that hoariest of PI cliches, a visit from an old love, one from whom the parting was painful and the wound slow to close. A television journalist at the station where she works has been murdered, and the man for whom she left Jacovich is under suspicion. Even worse, he was having an affair with the dead woman.

   But she wants Milan to prove him innocent, and she knows that the moral code that drove them apart will make him do everything in his power to help the man — if he takes the case. He knows he shouldn’t, but he does; and even before the last shot is fired he realizes that his first inclination was the right one.

   You’d think reviewing a book you like by an author you like is about as easy as it gets for a reviewer, wouldn’t you? Well, maybe not. When it’s an author you’ve reviewed many times before, there’s a tendency to run out of new things to say, or any fresh ways to say them, and that’s  where I am with Les Roberts.

   He still writes immensely readable prose; still makes of the City of Cleveland a colorful and likable character in itself; still writes about a strong, capable, but intensely human and fallible human being in Milan Jacovich; and is still as good at characterization as anyone around.

   But you’ve already heard all that from me, right? So why don’t I just reiterate that the man writes really good books, and that this is one of them? Okay. Done.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the One-Eyed Witness. Perry Mason #36. William Morrow, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #1041, paperback, 1954/5?. Other later reprint editions, both hardcover and paperback.

The Rap Sheet blog recently posted the following:

   “• Speaking of Mason, a video games and sports Web site called JStationX has posted a piece about the 1960 Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Violent Village.” It’s pretty bland, overall, but mentions that Mason “made appearances in other novels written [by] Erle Stanley Gardner, such as the Cool and Lam series.” What? Thanks to an extraordinary bit of luck, I own all 30 of the Bertha Cool/Donald Lam detective novels. And though I haven’t worked my way through every single one of those yet, nowhere have I come across a cameo appearance by Los Angeles’ best-known fictional defense attorney. Can anyone tell me in which book Mason figures, if he does?”

http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2023/10/bullet-points-info-dump-edition.html/a>

   Intrepid googler that I am, I found more specificity regarding the alleged Cool/Lam/Mason crossover in the same site. Mainly:

   â€œThere have been crossover novels featuring Perry Mason and other prominent detective characters, such as  The Case of the One-Eyed Witness  with Donald Lam and Bertha Cool.”

https://jstationx.com/perry-mason-the-case-of-the-renegade-refugee/

   Thus spurred, I immediately galloped and gulped the cited book, eagerly awaiting the appearance of Cool & Lam in this Perry Mason book.

   Spoiler Alert: They aren’t in it.

   But, since I read it, I might as well put down my thoughts on it.

   It starts out with Perry and Della having a swanky meal at a night club. They are interrupted by a frantic call on the club phone begging for help, referencing an envelope, followed by a shriek and a hangup. On cue, the envelope is delivered. The envelope contains $500 and asks Perry to contact a man living at a specified address and to show him a newspaper cutting referencing a blackmail.

   Mason, struck by the authenticity of the shriek, and decides to take the case — even though he has no idea who his client is.

   He and Della show up at the man’s house, the man acts kind of shady, denies any knowledge, and they leave. A couple of hours later, his house burns to the ground, the crusty smoking remains of his burnt corpse found within.

   Mason continues his sleuthing, clams to the cops, and gets in deep when his trail leads to another murder. It’s a bit surprising how far out on a limb Mason puts himself for a client he doesn’t know, who has signed no retainer, and who (when he finally finds her) denies that she retained him.

   The sleuthing part is fairly hard-boiled and very little courtroom stuff shows up til the end. The action is swift and violent, and ESG could write the trunk off an elephant, he’s so smooth. He could sell a set of luggage to the Brooklyn Bridge.

   Anywho, unfortunately the thing completely falls apart at the end. Like the man says, if you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em. And Perry & ESG certainly do their damndest to confuse you into thinking there’s a there there. But there ain’t. It doesn’t come together, and the whole thing falls apart in an apocalypse of word salad.

DANIEL BOYD – Aesop’s Travels: A Crackerjack Tale of the Old West. Montag Press, trade paperback, July 2023.

   Let me say right here at the start that in your eyes, you may not consider this an unbiased review. I know the author personally, and if you stop by this blog even only every so often, so do you. Under his own name, he goes by Dan Stumpf, and his book and movie reviews that are posted here are even better than mine, if that were at all possible, not to mention all of the most cogent comments he leaves on posts of others here.

   But since I believe that this is the book I most enjoyed reading all year, I thought I’d at least tell you some more about it, and you can make your own decision from there.

   It is a western, of the traditional variety, but I cannot give you another author to whose work you might compare it to. It is very nearly unique in many ways, and hopefully what I say here will explain further. It takes place in the 1880s, perhaps, in Dakota Territory, and the small town of Greenfield, where Beefy Beaumont, the narrator of the tale, now owns the Queen of Egypt saloon.

   And as the story opens, a good friend of his, Charlie Greenfield, a gambler who holds down a table in the saloon nearly every night of the week, is in jail and is destined to be hanged by the end of the week. There is more to the story than that, but it comes out only gradually and you’re be better off reading it on your own anyway.

   I hope I will not spoil things too much by saying the hanging does not happen, and when it doesn’t, Part Two of the book takes off from there. What I do need to tell you is something about Little Aesop, the young waif Beefy finds hunkered down in the saloon when he takes over. Little Aesop, by the way, is the new name Beefy gives him (from Billy Boogers, as I recall, based on the snot that continually flows from his nose, and whom Beefy teaches how to clean himself up.)

   Little Aesop, being only one step up from being the village idiot, so to speak, also needs to learn how to handle life, and to that end, Beefy tells him stories every evening from Aesop’s Fables.

   Now I admit that this may not seem like much to base a 300 page novel on, but it is the starting point that you may be wondering about as to the what and wherefore of the title, at least, and Part Two of the tale is a rip-roaring tale of retribution and revenge. You will read the last two chapters in perhaps thirty seconds or less.

   Participating in this second-half journey are: the Bartender, the Old Scout, the Outlaw, and Gambler, and of course, Little Aesop. They do not all come back alive, but while you, the reader, have no idea all along where the story is headed, it does come to an end in due course to the spot where it was headed all along.

   Daniel Boyd has a voice all his own, consistently humorous and folksy and real. If you like westerns which go off the beaten path as much as I do, then I think you’ll enjoy this one as much as I did.

   When I interviewed Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) in 1994, he explained the genesis of his novel The Halloween Tree (1972), whose youthful protagonists were based directly on his own childhood experiences and friends, “In many ways, or experiences I had later in Mexico. It’s an amalgam of memories and my interest in Halloween. I painted a picture [in 1960] called The Halloween Tree, a large tempera painting, it’s about three feet by four feet…I was having lunch with Chuck Jones, the animator, one day…It was the day after Halloween and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown [10/27/66] had been on, which I hated, and all my children ran over and kicked the TV set because they promised you the Great Pumpkin and [then] he never appeared.

   â€œWell, you can’t do that to kids, you know. You cannot promise them something that exciting, you’ve got to have [him] appear. Maybe it’s an illusion, maybe it’s a trick, whatever, the children think they see [him] and we the audience know that they don’t see him. But nevertheless, one way or the other [he’s] got to show up.

   “So I was complaining about this to Chuck [who made the classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (12/18/66) for MGM], and he said, ‘Well, hell, why don’t we do our own film on Halloween and do it right?’ [So] I brought him my painting and lugged it over to the animation studio and he said, ‘My God, that’s it, that’s the genetic tree, that’s the family tree of Halloween.

   â€œâ€˜Let’s go back in time to the caves and the Greek and Roman myths, and come on up through Europe with the Druids and into Ireland and Scotland and England and America and Mexico. You write the screenplay,’ which I promptly did in the fall of [that year], I believe.

   “And in about two months I had the thing ready to shoot, at which point MGM tore down all of its animation studios and fired everyone. We were all out on the street suddenly. I peddled the screenplay around and optioned it to various animation studios off and on for many years, and it took a good part of twenty years to finally get someone else interested,” during which he converted it into a novel illustrated by Joseph Mugnaini.

   In “a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state,” Tom Skelton and seven other boys dressed for All Hallows’ Eve are perplexed by the absence of Joe Pipkin, “the greatest boy who ever lived.” Emerging from his home pale, unmasked, and holding his right side, he pledges to catch up with them at “the place of the Haunts” in the inevitable ravine, whose tall, black-clad resident, Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud, slams the door with a “No treats. Only — trick!”

   Behind the house, they see the titular tree hung with 1,000 jack-o’-lanterns, and after rising from a pile of leaves in the guise of a skull, he offers to reveal “all the deep dark wild history of Halloween…”

   For this, they must travel to the Undiscovered Country (i.e., the Past), and when they say they must await Pip, he appears, feeling unwell, but in the ravine, his pumpkin light goes out, and he vanishes. Moundshroud says Death has “borrowed” Pipkin, “perhaps to hold him for ransom,” and taken him to the Undiscovered Country, so the lads can “solve two-mysteries-in-one.”

   He has them build a kite out of circus posters covering an abandoned barn, a pterodactyl with the boys (including Ralph Bengstrum and Wally Babb) as its tail, followed by a scythe-carrying Moundshroud, his cape serving as wings; they fly over the town and into Egypt, 2000 B.C., where food is left on doorsteps for homecoming ghosts.

   Deducing that the youthful mummy in the funeral procession they are watching is Pip, his friends are eager to save him, but Moundshroud cautions patience, proceeding to explain how fire got the cavemen through the night, wondering if the sun would rise the next day. Atop a pyramid, they see similar offerings being made in ancient Greece and Rome; from there, the wind blows them off to the British Isles to see “England’s own druid God of the Dead,” Samhain, who turns the dead to beasts for their sins. A dog amidst this maddened menagerie, Pip eludes them again before they watch animal sacrifices being made by the druid priests, cut down by Roman soldiers who themselves are cut down by Christians…

   In the Dark Ages, the boys are carried off by brooms, prompting a lesson in how “anyone too smart, who didn’t watch out,” was accused as a witch; they “liked to believe they had power, but they had none…”

   In Paris, Pip is chained as the clapper of a bronze bell on a huge scaffolding, and as they ascend to free him, Notre Dame builds itself beneath their feet, its giant shadow banishing the witches. Reaching the top and finding Pip gone, they whistle for gargoyles to ornament the cathedral, realizing that one figure is Pip, who says he is not dead yet, with parts of him in the places they’ve been and “a hospital a long way off home,” but a lightning bolt knocks him off before Pip reveals how they can help him.

   Moundshroud says they must reassemble the Autumn Kite and fly to Mexico, the night’s “last grand travel” and a place of powerful association for Bradbury, who was frightened by the mummies in the catacombs of Guanajuato and set several stories there.

   On El Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead Ones), the boys see the graveyard filled with people singing and placing flowers, cookies, sugar skulls, candles, and miniature funerals on the graves of their loved ones. Opening a trapdoor in an abandoned cemetery, Moundshroud says they must bring Pip up from the catacombs below, where they find him at the end of a long hall, both he and they too terrified to run the gauntlet with 50 mummies on a side.

   Moundshroud proposes a bargain: breaking a sugar skull bearing Pipkin’s name in eight pieces, he says they can ransom him if each gives a year from the end of his life, so they agree and eat the bits. Freed, Pip races right past them and disappears, so Moundshroud transports them back to Illinois, noting that “It’s all one…Always the same but different, eh? every age, every time. Day was always over. Night was always coming….Summer and winter, boys. Seedtime and harvest. Life and death. That’s what Halloween is, all rolled up in one.” The boys learn that Pip’s appendix was taken out just in time and, after decorating his porch with lit pumpkins to await his return, drift back to their own homes.

   Continued Bradbury, “finally David Kirschner…of Hanna-Barbera, came into my life. We talked about it for a year or so, and then finally two years ago he came back and said, ‘Hey, we got the money, Ted Turner’s one of our new bosses, and we want to buy The Halloween Tree. Will you freshen up your screenplay?’ I said, ‘I sure will.’

   “So I spent a couple of months [on it]…and that was it…Nothing was changed after that. We added a little more narration…They said, ‘Look, you’re ignoring your own best qualities here. Let’s add more of your individual voice, and let’s have you read it, hunh?’ And by God they were right. I went into the studio and read the narration, and it’s a nice addition.”

   The film halves the trick-or-treaters to Jenny (voiced by Annie Barker), replacing Henry-Hank Smith in the Witch costume, Tom (Edan Gross; Skeleton), Ralph (Alex Greenwald; Mummy), and Wally (Andrew Keegan; Gargoyle).

   Backed with evocative music by John Debney, an Oscar nominee for The Passion of the Christ (2004) who’d also worked with producer — and in this case director — Mario Piluso on Jonny’s Golden Quest (1993), the narration is almost verbatim from the book. After seeing Pip (Kevin Michaels) taken off in an ambulance, they find a note urging them to “Go ahead without me,” but seek to visit him instead; a shortcut through the ravine takes them to Moundshroud (Leonard Nimoy).

   Pip’s ghostly form takes a pumpkin bearing his likeness from the titular tree, vanishing in a tornado; this becomes a concrete cinematic MacGuffin rather than his peripatetic person or spirit, continually eluding Moundshroud, who seeks his soul.

   After the kite takes them to ancient Egypt, a more kid-friendly druid episode — sans Samhain, sacrifices, or Roman soldiers to “Destroy the pagans! ”— is set in Stonehenge, segueing via the Broom Festival to Notre Dame, which Moundshroud says, echoing Quasimodo, offers “Sanctuary!” The gargoyles’ connection with the monster mask worn by oft-aghast Wally (a drinking game based on each time he gasps, “Oh, my gosh!” would imperil the liver) is now established.

   Evoking Bradbury’s Playboy story (September 1963) and Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode (10/26/64) “The Life Work of Juan Diaz,” the final stop finds a more assertive Tom braving the mummies to reach Pip, taking the blame for wishing that something would happen to make him the group’s leader. But at the moment of forgiveness, Moundshroud grabs the pumpkin: “Children, it’s business. With his illness, his rent came due, and there was no payment. He’s mine now,” leading Tom to suggest the bargain instead. Pip flies off with his pumpkin and they are all whisked home, where it is found adorning his porch rail, Pip having narrowly survived the surgery, while Moundshroud delivers his summation about the universality of Halloween, and flies away with the remaining pumpkins from the tree.

   â€œ[I]t’s a nice film, and I…won an Emmy for it [it was also nominated for Outstanding Animated Children’s Program]. I had a wonderful relationship with the studio, and no problems, no friction. The film is…available…so people can buy it, and it’s been on two years running…It’s hard to find the damn thing. They’ll have it on in the middle of the afternoon or late at night, and I hope maybe next year they’ll have it at a decent hour.”

   But I’ll leave the last word to his literary characters: “They were stopped by a final shout from Moundshroud: ‘Boys! Well, which was it? Tonight, with me — trick or treat?’ The boys took a vast breath, held it, burst it out: ‘Gosh, Mr. Moundshroud — both!’”

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

   Excerpted from the forthcoming (God willing) The Group: Sixty Years of California Sorcery on Screen.

      Edition cited:

The Halloween Tree: Bantam (1974)

      Online source:

https://archive.org/details/the-halloween-tree_202106

TODD DOWNING – Vultures in the Sky. Hugh Rennert #4. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1935. Coachwhip Publications, paperback, 2012. American Mystery Classics, hardcover, 2020.

   Hugh Rennert, special investigator for the U.S. Customs Service, is on his way from Laredo, Texas. to Mexico City by train. One of his fellow passengers reports to him a sinister conversation overheard by his wife the night before, in Laredo, in which a threat to “blast the train” was made and there was a cryptic comment about earrings and cuffs and “don’t forget the extra edition.”

   While Rennert ponders the meaning of this, the train enters a long tunnel through El Paso de Los Muertos-and when it emerges, he finds one of the other passengers dead in his Pullman chair.

   Who was the dead man and why and how was he killed?

   And which of the odd group of remaining passengers is responsible? Was it the drunken reporter, the badly sunburned man who hides behind dark glasses, the religious fanatic, the novelty supply salesman, the girl traveling under someone else’s name, or the strange woman who seems totally devoid of emotion and who looks at life with the eyes of a spectator at a play?

   Rennert’s job is made all the more difficult by a strike of Pullman employees of the Mexican National Railway, soldiers sent out by the government to keep order, the kidnapping of the three-year-old son of a wealthy Anglo-American family, another murder, and an unscheduled stop deep in the Mexican desert. But matters take their deadliest turn when the Pullman containing Rennert and the suspects is mysteriously uncoupled, stranding them-with the murderer in their midst-in the middle of nowhere.

   This is an expertly crafted whodunit, well-written (except for a mildly annoying overuse of commas where there should be periods) and offering a vivid, detailed portrait of Mexico in the mid-l 930s. Although an American (and one-quarter Choctaw), Todd Downing lived in Mexico for many years and his work reflects not only intimate knowledge of the country but a deep love and respect for it and its people. Anyone who likes his mystery plot enlivened by frequent glimpses of another culture both old and new is certain to find Downing’s work enjoyable.

   All but one of his nine whodunits are set in Mexico (the one exception has a Texas border background), and all are well worth investigating. Among the best of the other six featuring Hugh Rennert are The Cat Screams ( 1934), which deals with a tide of eerie suicides in the American colony at Taxco; The Case of the Unconquered Sisters (1936), in which Rennert investigates a railway freight wreck and murder at an archeological dig on the edge of a huge sea of lava; and The Last Trumpet (1937), which has a bull fighting background. Downing’s remaining two novels feature Texas sheriff Peter Bounty: Death Under the Moonflower (1938) and The Lazy Lawrence Murders (1941). The latter title, like Vultures in the Sky, deals with murder and mystery aboard a Mexican train.

         ———
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.