SUE GRAFTON – W is for Wasted. G. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, September 2013. Berkley, paperback, August 2014.

   Only three more to go, unless Sue Grafton has something else up her sleeve. X is out in hardcover, but while I’m anxious to know what comes next for Kinsey Millhone, I’ve decided to bide my time until August, when it’s scheduled to come out in paperback.

   That is to say, I think I can. The case itself is not all that interesting in Wasted — well, there are two cases at the beginning, but I doubt you’ll care if I let the cat out of the bag and tell you what you already know — it’s what happens to Kinsey along the way that’s going to have me on the fence about this.

   In Wasted, her 85-year-old neighbor and landlord Henry gets a cat, Kinsey has some encounters with some ex-boy friends, and learns a lot about her father’s side of family, and thus meets some cousins she had no idea existed, one of whom follows her home, sort of. As did the cat, in another way.

   At the beginning there are two dead bodies for Kinsey to tell us about: the first of a homeless man who has a note in his pocket with her name on it; the second that of a fellow PI with an unsavory reputation, but with a wife who loved him. Every once in a while, Kinsey’s narration of her own tale is interrupted by third person flashbacks into the life of that aforementioned down-on-his-luck PI before he died.

   I’m not sure why Grafton did this. If as a result anyone reading this book thinks there’s any mystery left after about halfway through, I think they should go back to grade school to find out what two and two add up to.

   I’m also not sure why Grafton has Kinsey relate everything she does, down to the minutest bit of minutia possible, whether it be meals, areas of town she drives through, or the GNP of the nation. Maybe I’m kidding about that. Perhaps it’s to break up the monotony of what a dogged PI has to do to solve a case. (Kinsey does not have the luxury of reading the interspersed interludes about what that deceased what up to before his death.)

   There is also one big surprise in store for Kinsey in this book, and I’ll bet you a sizable size of money that every other review of this book will tell you all about it. But I won’t.

MILLENNIUM. 20th Century Fox, 1989. Kris Kristofferson, Cheryl Ladd, Daniel J. Travanti, Robert Joy, Lloyd Bochner. Screenwriter: John Varley, based on his short story “Air Raid.” Director: Michael Anderson.

   I wish I could say that I have read the story this movie was based on, but although I read a lot of John Varley’s work, “Air Raid” isn’t one of them. Varley is a very good science fiction writer, and no matter how much I’d like to say that this is a very good science fiction movie, I hate to tell you that I just can’t do it.

   What’s worse, I can see that this could have been a very good movie, but while it has its fans, I don’t think it did very well overall, critically or financially.

   What Millennium is is a time-travel movie, and while the “Back to the Future” series of movies show that time-travel movies can be done so that they make sense, even to a general audience, they have to be gosh darn hard to pull off, never once allowing the viewer to become confused along the way. The premise in this movie is this: Sometime in the future of our planet, life has become so bleak that they send commando squads back the present to kidnap airline passengers who about to die in an accidental crash, replace them with identical dead bodies and bring them back to the future to send them off to colonize other planets to maintain human civilization.

   The idea being that this is a way to not disrupt the true flow of time, since people about to die would not be missed, causing a different change of events to occur, rather than the present one. As anyone who has read time-travel stories knows full well, changing things in the past can seriously change things in the future.

   Kris Kristofferson plays Bill Smith, a head NTSB investigator in charge of looking into one such crash, during which he accidentally meets Cheryl Ladd, leader of a commando crew such as described above, the second time for her, the first time for him. Can one chance encounter such as this, under the strangest conditions, lead to romance? Of course it can.

   The idea of time-travel paradoxes is well explained — for example, what would happen if you went into the past and killed your grandfather before you were born? — but even the best attempts to present the same on the screen can easily go awry.

   It may have helped if they had asked me — should I go back in the past and offer my services? — but when scenes shifted in this movie, a caption of what time and year it was would have helped. I had to back up once to start over again myself to make sure when it was that what on the screen was happening. Luckily with modern technology (a DVD player, not a time machine) I could do that easily.

   If the presentation hadn’t been so confusing, this would have been a very enjoyable movie, with one more caveat: If you watch this movie and start to get worried about timequakes, with a paradox caused in the past rippling its way through to the present, shaking the furniture around like an earthquake was happening, you needn’t. You’d never know.

CLIFTON ADAMS – Death’s Sweet Song. Gold Medal 483; paperback original; 1st printing, March 1955. Black Curtain Press, paperback, 2013. Reprinted by Stark House Press, softcover, 2014, combined with the novel Whom Gods Destroy (Gold Medal 291, 1953).

   Adams is perhaps better known as an award-winning writer of westerns, but this is one of two or three crime/suspense novels he’s written as well. It’s solidly in the small area of the field once very popular — the story of a good man gone bad, tempted too far by a weakness of the flesh and the overpowering proximity of the sensuous evil of an all-too-willing woman.

   If this a tale no longer seen very often, Gold Medal is probably at fault, for they surely wore out their presses on this particular sub-genre of eroticism during their first ten years in business (pointing out as I say this that practitioners of the form include such noted authors as Charles Williams and John D. MacDonald).

   This one takes place in and around a shabby motel on Route 66, at a time before the interstate system of highways made us a nation of Holiday Inners. Creston, Oklahoma — a town a smart guy simply aches to get out of, and Joe Hooper is pining away for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come knocking. Beth is the local girl everyone assumes he will marry some day. It is taken for granted, a pinpoint of accuracy showing how life goes on in a small town.

   The wife of the safe-cracker staying overnight in Joe’s motel, in the room next door, is named Paula. Naturally he cuts himself in on their plans. Murder is not, however, originally on the agenda. It’s hard to to say how stupid men can be over women, yet granting a bit of leeway, I suppose they can make messes of their lives as easily as this.

Rating:  B minus.

Note:   One of Clifton Adams’ pen names was Jonathan Gant, and one of the books he wrote under that name was Never Say No to a Killer (Ace Double D-157). You can read my review of that book here.

UNTAMED WOMEN. United Artists, 1952. Mikel Conrad, Lyle Talbot, and a lot of people whose names would mean nothing to you. Look ’em up at IMDb if you want to satisfy your morbid curiosity; do I have to do all the work around here? Written by George Wallace Sayre. Directed by W. Merle Connell.

   An adolescent-dream film, written by a B-movie veteran and directed by a maker of early Nudie Flicks.

   The story opens with a military doctor of some sort (played by that bad-movie stalwart Lyle Talbot) explaining Mikel Conrad’s case to an Archaeologist (?!) then shifts to a hospital room where the kindly Doc shoots Conrad full of some kind of drug that triggers a flashback to the rest of the film: Four men from a WWII bomber crew shot down and cast up on an uncharted island that turns out to be populated by beautiful women in skimpy outfits — why can’t I have flashbacks like that?

   All is not sweetness and spice here, however; it seems the High Priestess of the nubiles is mistrustful of our lucky heroes, although the rest of the tribe can’t wait to get their hands on them. Complications ensue, including mild bondage of the sort you used to see on the covers of All Man magazine, dinosaurs, invasive hairy cavemen, earthquakes and an Oedipus complex. There’s also a “comic relief” who will remind you irresistibly of that irritating guy in your barracks who never shut up.

   The Dinosaurs in this film are “borrowed” from One Million B.C. (1940) using the same stock footage that appeared in so much low-budget film and TV of the 1950s, from Jungle Jim to Rin Tin Tin. Indeed, it cropped up so often in those days that I feel I grew up with it; the lizard monsters have become like old friends for me, the caves and cliffs as familiar as the scenes of my childhood, and the volcano erupting has assumed the status of a perennial treat. Untamed Women thus became for me not just another silly movie, but a nostalgic revisit to my tawdry youth.

   Be that as it may, I would estimate that of Untamed Women’s 70-minute running time, 20 minutes are courtesy of One Million B.C. The sad part is that they constitute the most interesting parts of the movie. The rest is taken up in talk, a long walk around Bronson Canyon, more talk, a bit of cheesecake and a lot of plain damn silliness.

   The acting… well my first impression was that it seemed pretty bad, but on reflection, it may be the only dramatically valid response to a script that includes lines like “The strange-tongued one speaketh in riddles.” And “Shoot anything with hair that moves!”

   Okay, Untamed Women may not be quite as enjoyably bad as some other films I could name, but I’d have to say it has a solid place in the ranks, and fans of this sort of thing should put it on their lists.

GRET LANE – Death Prowls the Cove. Herbert Jenkins, UK, hardcover, no date stated but known to be 1942.

   Nothing much seems to be known about Gret Lane, author of 13 works of crime and detective published in England between 1925 and 1943, except that the name itself is a pseudonym. The first two are standalone tales, two others are cases tackled (and solved, one presumes) by a policeman by the name of Inspector Hook. All of the rest (nine in all) feature an amateur detective originally named Kate Clare, but once she is married, she is Kate Marsh, as she is in Death Prowls the Cove.

   And in eight of the nine, she is paired up with a police inspector named John Barrin, but by the time Cove was written, and perhaps for some time before, he had retired from Scotland Yard. Both families, Kate and her husband Tony Marsh (who writes adventure tales), and Barrin and his wife Jennie (a matron of 60 or so who knits a lot) now live in semi-detached cottages in the small town of White Owl Cove along the shore in South Devon.

   Between them they have two maids, Polly and Sarah, sisters who in turn are engaged to two former miscreants, now totally reformed, from earlier books, named Bill and Jo-Jo. Dead not too far into the book is Jo-Jo’s Uncle Pierre, a former smuggler who has come to live in England from France.

   Suspected are Uncle Pierre’s former colleagues in crime; Bob Daw, a loutish local poacher of a fellow who had an argument with the dead man in a local drinking establishment before his death; a coterie of neighbors high above the cove who act very suspiciously; and Bill or Jo-Jo themselves, separately or together.

   This is a very cozy affair, with lots of huddled plans and strategies on the part of the combined two households, along with a local police inspector who is more than willing to let both Kate and John Berrin have the way with the investigation.

   And any self-respecting criminal should begin to be on his guard when Kate starts reflectively rubbing the side of her nose. I hope I haven’t made this as unexciting as it is not, but truthfully the killer(s) can easily discerned by the laziest of readers — the scale and scope of the tale being so narrowly restricted as it is.

   I wouldn’t mind reading another, if I could afford it. The least expensive copy offered for sale online is in the $60 range, and some of the earlier ones have even higher price tags, if they are offered for sale anywhere at all.

       The Kate Clare (Marsh) series —

The Cancelled Score Mystery. Jenkins 1929 [JB]
The Curlew Coombe Mystery. Jenkins 1930 [JB]
The Lantern House Affair. Jenkins 1931
The Hotel Cremona Mystery. Jenkins 1932 [JB]
The Unknown Enemy. Jenkins 1933 [JB]
Death Visits the Summer-House. Jenkins 1939 [JB]
Death in Mermaid Lane. Jenkins 1940 [JB]
Death Prowls the Cove. Jenkins 1942 [JB]
The Guest with the Scythe. Jenkins 1943 [JB]

   I picked up used copies of two novels the other day by an author I’d somehow missed, Bernard Schopen, who writes about a Reno, Nevada detective named Jack Ross. The books are The Big Silence (1989) and The Desert Look (1990).

   They’re not bad, strongly reminiscent of Ross Macdonald in how they deal with crimes of the past that haunt the present, but Jack Ross is much more of a presence than Archer. The prose is powerful in places, particularly lyrical in describing the desert, but overwritten in others.

   The stories he tells are both tortuous and tortured, at times making Macdonald seem cheerful in comparison. Both were published by Mysterious Press in hardback and paper. I’m unaware of others, but these are worth checking out if PIs are your thing.

Bibliographic Update: There was a third book in the series: The Iris Deception (University of Nevada Press, softcover, 1996).

JAMES ROLLINS – Amazonia. William Morrow, hardcover, 2002. Avon, paperback, 2003.

   James Rollins is a vet who has written several thrillers that don’t pose any serious threat to Clive Cussler but travel the same well-worn path of outsize adventures in tropical/arctic/marine settings, with fantastic elements that include lost races, animals surviving from prehistoric times, and cardboard characters. As you might imagine, I enjoy this sort of flimflammery.

   Nathan Rand’s father and his scientific party were lost in the “lush wilderness of the Amazon” years ago and presumed dead. Now a surviving member has made his way from the depths of the jungle but has died, his body acidly eaten away by malignant tumors. The most notable thing about the dead returnee is that he had one arm when he disappeared with the Rand party, |but stumbled from the jungle years later with two arms.

   The government quickly forms a search team while a multinational corporation, the company that originally financed the Rand expedition, is secretly fielding its own search team, not to rescue but to retrieve any medical data they might use and destroy the government party.

   Add to the mix a mysterious, perhaps legendary tribe of jaguar warriors, and jungle perils that beggar every imagination but that of the author and you have a predictable Rollins’ juggernaut on the move.

   The most memorable — and sympathetic — creation is a black jaguar trained by one of the members of the government crew. I’m sure that you’1l be relieved to know that he survives, although not all of the other good guys do. The most striking element is a gigantic, centuries old tree that contains the still living bodies of millennia of animals and humans in its roots, feeding off their vital essences and creating a unique evolutionary record.

   Now to track down Ice Hunt, which appears to be the latest in the apparently successful and profitable series. (I say that only because I can’t imagine that anyone would continue publishing these overwritten, implausible but fun novels if they weren’t making money.)

SOL MADRID. MGM, 1968. David McCallum, Stella Stevens, Telly Savalas, Ricardo Montalban, Rip Torn, Pat Hingle, Paul Lukas, Capo Riccione, Michael Ansara. Screenplay by David Karp based on the book Fruit of the Poppy by Robert Wilder. Director: Brian G. Hutton.

   Hot off his television role in CBS’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., David McCallum starred in the hardboiled thriller, Sol Madrid. Featuring an alternatively psychedelic and jazzy score by Lalo Schifrin, Sol Madrid has McCallum portraying the eponymous title character, a cynical, at times ruthless Interpol agent tasked with bringing down a heroin ring run by flamboyant criminal mastermind by the name of Emil Dietrich (a scenery-chewing Telly Savalas).

   Set in Mexico, the movie also features Rip Torn as a sadistic mafia boss, Stella Stevens as a nice small town girl who gets herself mixed up with some unsavory characters, and Ricardo Montalban as Madrid’s Mexican Interpol contact who wants nothing more than to live it up and retire early.

   Although the plot really is quite basic with very little new to offer, the movie’s explicit depiction of heroin usage certainly pushed boundaries when it was first released. Not only does the movie begin with a seedy scene in a shooting gallery, there’s also a horrific sequence in which Rip Torn’s character tortures a girl by deliberately getting her hooked on dope.

   Despite some tense moments and some terse dialogue, the movie ends up feeling tremendously incomplete. Not only does one get the impression that some of the movie’s most important sequences may have been edited out, but one can’t help but wonder whether most of the actors in the film were simply there for their paycheck. In more ways than one, that is a real shame, for Sol Madrid really had the potential to be something far more than just another rather forgettable late 1960s studio production, albeit one with just enough punch to it to make you want to watch to the very end.

MARY ROBERTS RINEHART – The Door. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1930. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback.

   This is a typical Mary Roberts Rinehart production. Eschewing the latter-day Gothic type, as someone has described it, as “a girl gets a house,” Rinehart pretty much sticks with an elderly maiden lady gets, or has, a house. (The Red Lamp is about a man who gets a house, complete with haunt, but that was a one-time aberration.) And in that house peculiar and frightening things always happen.

   Well, at least the goings-on frighten the maids. The gentry, while aware that something peculiar may be taking place, generally deny it orally in the hope that it will go away or investigate it so surreptitiously or so cautiously or so stupidly that they might well not have bothered.

   In The Door, the family nurse leaves the house on a cryptic errand. She does not come back. Some days later her body is found.

   A man is seen upon the stair, and thereupon disappears. Someone is mysteriously wandering about the house at night. A woman who comes to the door and is turned away is subsequently found dead to the last drop. A young cousin of the lady of the house is attacked on the grounds, and later on her boyfriend is treated the same way.

   There is a great deal of people not telling other people things they ought to know, particularly concealing information that it would be helpful for the police to be aware of. Such clues as there are were not sufficient for this reader to figure out who was the murderer, but Rinehart has never been a fair-play author. Indeed, in her introduction to The Mary Roberts Crime Book, which contains The Door, The Confession, and The Red Lamp, she states: “… I shall probably always be known as a writer of detective books, which I emphatically am not.” It can’t be said fairer than that, Mary.

   Rinehart was certainly no literary stylist, but her writing has always been competent and maybe a little better than that of the general run of Gothic writers. She did, of course, have her weaknesses. One is her penchant for anticipation. She frequently tells us what her characters are going to encounter. This wouldn’t be so bad, but she then has to tell us what they encounter when they do encounter it.

   Another fault she is guilty of is having her main character draw up a list of questions about what has happened. She may do this because she thinks her readers are nitwits who can’t keep in mind all the presumed oddities or because the demands of serialisation, which is how many of her novels were first published, required that the readers’ memories be refreshed.

   Her novels do give you an upper-class picture of a bygone era when servants were numerous and the females among them were given to fainting fits and other manifestations likely to irritate the gentry. The novels should be read for this aspect and their atmosphere of suspense.

APPOINTMENT IN HONDURAS. RKO, 1953. Glenn Ford, Ann Sheridan, Zachary Scott, Rodolfo Acosta, Jack Elam, Ric Roman, Rico Alaniz. Director: Jacques Tourneur.

   Mostly a mediocre film, I regret to report. Perhaps I was expecting more, which sometimes happens. Glenn Ford plays a passenger on a ship making its way along the eastern coast of Central America. He’s a man on a mission, a mission that needs his presence (an whatever is in his money belt) in Honduras, where a revolution has just taken place. When the captain of the boat refuses to make landfall, Ford releases a gang of prisoners on board, and in return they take a married couple on the ship along as hostages.

   The couple (Ann Sheridan and Zachary Scott) are married but not happily so. He is a weak man but also a wealthy one. As we discover as the movie goes along, we gradually realize that she was aware of his first quality when she married him, but the second one compensated for that flaw considerably.

   Until she meets Glenn Ford. As this group of very disparate strangers makes their way through the jungle, complete with pythons, pumas and tiger fish, more than a fight for survival is going on. You’d think that a steamy romance would ensue, but as a romance, it’s not all that steamy. Glenn Ford was a master at portraying a man with something simmering inside, and so it is here, and we get the feeling that his mission is more important to him than whatever Ann Sheridan would like to have develop between the two of them.

   Do you know, I don’t think I knew that Ann Sheridan had red hair before. Why, when she was younger, did they always seem to cast her in black-and-white movies? One of the great unsolved mysteries of the film world.

   I am also not a big fan of Jacques Tourneur. I’m sure that this is not one of the films that made his reputation, but even in his best-known films, while I find the stories extremely well filmed and choreographed, I find the movies themselves do not often make a coherent whole. So it is here. There’s a lot of mystery going on, and there isn’t. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but it does to me.