THE CASE OF THE DANGEROUS ROBIN “The Tin Caper.” Syndicated / ZIV. 10 April 1961 [as aired on KNXT, Los Angeles] (Season One, Episode 26). Rick Jason (Robin Scott), Jean Blake (Phyllis Collier). Screenplay: Robert Lesllie Bellem. Director: William Conrad. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below but note that the picture quality is only fair at best, and the sound synchronization is way off).

   Robin Scott was a free-lance insurance investigator, which I’m going to say qualifies him as a PI. His usual fee is ten percent of whatever he saves the insurance company in that week’s episode. It isn’t particularly noticeable in this one, but his  primary gimmick is that he does not use a gun, only karate. His girl friend Phyllis Collier somehow gets mixed up in all of cases, either by hindering or on occasion (perhaps) helping.

   Gone missing in this one is a ship’s cargo of tin, dumped overboard, the captain and crew claim, during a violent storm that otherwise threatened to sink the vessel. Robin thinks otherwise. In the guise of wanting to elope and kidnapping Phyllis for a large ransom from her father as well, he wrangles his way onto the ship, gets both of them captured, only to escape, and gee it’s all too easy.

   And not very involving, either. Other episodes may be better, but on the other hand, I seriously doubt if many of them still exist. The Case of the Dangerous Robin lasted for one season of 38 episodes.

PATRICK HAMILTON – Midnight Bell. Hardcover, UK, 1929. Little Brown, US, hardcover, 1930. Included in the 3-in-1 trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (Constable, UK, hardcover, 1935); republished by Vintage, 1998.

   Fact and fiction. Where’s the line? Even your dreams are drawn from your life. Your life drawn from your dreams. They seep into one another. Like liquor in a cake. Sweet and bitter. As the case may be.

   Patrick Hamilton, drawn from his life with little camouflage, pulls a draught, a drought, for the tolling of the Midnight Bell. ’Tis the name of a bar. The bar he tends. His name is Bob.

Bob falls for a young, pretty prostitute. Frail. And fallen. And he could save her. Maybe.

   He feels like he’s slumming. Like he’s bound for much greater glories. A great author to be. But he feels for Jenny, the wayward waif. She’s got an innocence that belies her life. Her life is a lie that lays beneath her virtue: an innocence that cannot be spoilt. And innocence and purity that none of her Johns can plunder. That only he can see.

   He has saved 80 pounds. By the hardest. And he asks her to go away with him. To flee, with him, this drudgery. ‘The glazed blue eyes of a carefree kleptomaniac.’

   And she agrees. My Bob, she says. My Bob, come to save me.

   She, thru the tried and true method of exchanging her bearing on every other meeting from warmth to coldness, she succeeds in extracting every last pound from ‘her Bob’. And leaves him flat. Preying on his prayers. Squeezing every last droplet of blood money from his innocence, his adoration, and his love.

   She was ‘born to toil but did not toil….for that reason bold, lazy, ruthless, and insensitive: that they were women of the street.’

   â€˜Possibly one of the peculiarly depressing situations in the world is this: to be a waiter who has once had eighty pounds, to have fallen incontinently in love with a blue-eyed young prostitute of twenty-one, to have arranged to meet her at Victoria so as to go away on a holiday with her, to have waited for an hour for her without result, to have decided to get wildly drunk, to have succeeded, to have had every penny of the last of your money stolen….to have been got to bed by the charity of another prostitute….and, finally, to wake up, trembling with cold, in a doss house, at the black bitter hour of half-past five, and slowly divine that all this has occurred.’

   â€˜Were there any lower circles, he wondered, to which he might descent in hell?’
   

PATRICK HAMILTON – Hangover Square. Constable, UK, hardcover, 1941. Random House, US, hardcover, 1942. Film: TCF, 1945 (scw: Barre Lyndon; dir: John Brahm).

   Patrick Hamilton would have his revenge. At least in dreams. In Hangover Square.

   Here he calls himself Bone. George Harvey Bone.

   Bone is in love. With Netta Longdon. Yet another wayward waif. Warm and cold. With greed.

   â€˜Netta. The tangled net of her hair-the dark net-the brunette. The net in which he was caught-netted. Nettles. The wicked poison-nettles from which had been brewed the potion which was in his blood. Stinging nettles. She stung and wounded him with words from her red mouth. Nets. Fishing-nets. Mermaid’s nets. Bewitchment. Syrens — the unearthly beauty of the sea. Nets. Nest. To nestle. To nestle against her. Rest. Breast. In her net. Netta. You could go on like that for ever-all the way back to London.’

   But while George Harvey Bone is ordinarily too soft, too British, to proper and repressed to dole out the punishment Netta deserves for her deceit, there is another George Harvey Bone. For Bone has broken into two. A psychotic break of which his proper personality is unaware. Except for the click of the switch.

   â€˜Snap…Click! — just like that…

   â€˜He was walking along the front at Brighton, in the sombre early dawn, in the deep blue cloudy not-quite-night, and it had happened again…

   â€˜Click!…It was as though his head were a five-shilling Kodak camera, and someone had switched over the little trigger which makes the exposure. He knew the sensation so well, yet he never failed to marvel at its oddity.

   â€˜Like a camera. But instead of an exposure having been made the opposite had happened — an inclosure — a shutting down, a locking in. A moment before his head, his brain, were out in the world, seeing, hearing, sensing objects directly; now they were enclosed behind glass (like Crown jewels, like Victorian wax fruit), behind a film — the film of the camera, perhaps, to continue the photographic analogy-a film behind which all things and people moved eerily, without colour, vivacity or meaning, grimly, puppet-like, without motive or conscious volition of the own…’

   In his periods of psychotic trance he moves ineluctably, intractably, towards the single minded purpose that he must kill Netta. Kill her and escape to Maidenhead, pastoral land of his childhood, on a rowboat with his sister, in the warmth of the sun. And braying sheep. At Maidenhead he’ll be safe. But first, he must kill Netta.

   So what we see thru the course of the novel is Netta jerking Bone around, yanking his chain when she needs money, insinuating her love, then coldly casting him aside when she gets it. Which only serves to deepen his adoration, his affliction — and his psychotic break.

   Midnight Bell is a well-drawn slice of life. Reminiscent of Barfly. But serves best as an aperitif for Hangover Square.

   Hangover Square is a terrific novel. One of the best I know. And what elevates the thing to a level with Simenon’s Stain in the Snow and Bataille’s Blue of Noon is its confluence with the rise of fascism in Europe. While George Harvey Bone is losing himself to psychosis, the threat of war is at hand. The climax of Hangover Square coordinates with the German invasion of Poland.

   Violent eclipse was coming home. Schindler’s List ends with the quote: ‘Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.’ For George Harvey Bone, it’s the reverse.

EDWARD S. AARONS – Assignment Sumatra. Sam Durell #38. Fawcett Gold Medal M3139, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1974.

   I continue to be amazed at the geographic background Aarons was able to include in all of his CIA agent Sam Durell novels – the sights and sounds of each of the locations the stories take place in. It is possible, of course, that I’m always fooled – I’ve been in, for all practical purposes, none of them– but they all seem real to me, and if I am fooled, that Aarons was faking it all the while by going to library and taking out a huge stack of books, it’s in good way, and I don’t mind at all.

   There’s lots of local atmosphere in this one, which takes place, obviously, in Sumatra, where a Southeast Asia diplomatic conference is going on, and Sam’s assignment is to make sure the good Communist leader of one country is not assassinated and replaced by a body double while en route by a bad Communist leader of that country.

   Assisting him, and definitely against his wishes, as he prefers to work alone, is a girl named Lydia (blonde and beautiful) who is a trained assassin herself. What follows is a non-stop tale of twists and turns, captures and narrow escapes and deadly double- crosses, from beginning to end.

   There’s no need to go into them all. Either you will want to read this book without knowing anything more about it than this, or you’ve already read it and you know exactly what I’m talking about.

   Option C, that you aren’t interested in books like this, we won’t even bring up.

   It is too bad that the Aarons estate has been so difficult to track down. Several publishers specializing in reprinting old vintage tough guy novels such as this are very very interested. On the other hand, the books were extremely popular, back in the day, and for readers, used copies are still extremely easy to find.

POSTSCRIPT: I forgot to say that the conclusion of this one is as tough and hard-boiled an ending as any that I’ve read in a long, long time.

BLACK SADDLE “Client Meade.” NBC, Four Star Productions. 17 January 1959 (Season One, Episode Two). Peter Breck (Clay Culhane), Russell Johnson (Marshal Gib Scott), Anna Lisa (Nora Travers). Guest Cast: Clu Gulager (Andy Meade), Ned Glass. Director: Roger Kay. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   The premise of this TV western series that ran for two seasons, the first for NBC, the second on ABC (*) was that when gunslinger Clay Culhane quit his gunslingers ways he turned instead to practicing law. There was more to his backstory than this, but all that was presumably covered in the first episode of season one. This is the second.

   Not yet having watched the first episode, I do not know the significance of his black saddle. Other than a carry over from his more wayward way of making a living, perhaps there was none. And of course even though he is now a lawyer, there are times when his guns are needed.

   Clay’s client in this one is Andy Meade (Clu Gulager), a drifter who is handy with a gun who is followed into town by three men with vengeance is their eyes toward him, but when the oldest confronts him, the man dies. A witness could verify that it was self defense, and he does at first, but when it comes time for a hearing, frightened for his family, he changes his testimony.

   This is the crux of the story, but for a tale that’s 30 minutes long, including time for commercials, there is a lot more action to come, including a break from jail, another shootout, and a recanting of the changed testimony, which comes too late for everyone to survive.

   As for the players, I hesitate to suggest this, but I think Clu Gulager had more onscreen charisma than Peter Brock and Russell Johnson combined (none), but maybe that’s just me. Anna Lisa, as the woman behind the front desk of the hotel, had little to do in this one.

   What this is, overall, as “adult” westerns on TV at the time so often were – and there surely were a lot of time – is a short little morality play. Don’t tell lies, and let the law be the guide. Done, and done, and most neatly so.

(*) Thanks to Mike Doran and his Comment #1 for the correction on this.

   Rex Stout published one Nero Wolfe novel every year from 1946 (The Silent Speaker) to ’66 (Death of Doxy), and often a collection as well; the 1954 crop included, respectively, The Black Mountain and Three Men Out. Each novella first appeared in The American Magazine under a different title: “Invitation to Murder” (as “Will to Murder,” August 1953), “The Zero Clue” (as “Scared to Death,” December 1953), and “This Won’t Kill You” (as, oddly, “This Will Kill You,” September 1952). In “Invitation,” Archie lures Wolfe out of the house while trying to determine which of three women aspire to marry a wealthy widower in a wheelchair, and may have made him one with ptomaine poisoning.

   â€œThe Zero Clue” concerns the murder of a probability expert and former math professor, Leo Heller, whose penchant for complex formulae strongly recalls F.O. Savarese of And Be a Villain (1948). Justifying the collection’s sabermetric title, “This Won’t Kill You” opens with the unlikely spectacle of Wolfe acceding to the request by house guest Pierre Mondor — one of Les Quinze Maîtres, introduced in Too Many Cooks (1938) — to attend a baseball game at the Polo Grounds. The murder of a player, and drugging of four others, costs the Giants the seventh and deciding World Series contest against the Red Sox, with Wolfe hired by part-owner and oil millionaire Emil Chisholm, already deeply in his debt.

   A pivotal entry, The Black Mountain builds on the events of Over My Dead Body (1940), and opens as Wolfe visits the morgue to see his boyhood friend Marko Vukcic, owner of Rusterman’s Restaurant, shot outside his home on East 54th Street. Widow Carla Britton (formerly Lovchen), Wolfe’s adopted daughter, believes agents of Belgrade or Moscow killed him for supporting rebels in their homeland of Montenegro (the Black Mountain), now part of Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia. Sending weapons is against U.S. law, so her disappearance provokes a return visit from G-man Stahl, and after learning of her death in Montenegro from Paolo Telesio in Bari, Italy, Wolfe says he requires a passport.

   As we follow them to London (where Ethelbert Hitchcock is now Geoffrey), Rome, and across the Adriatic, Archie notes, “The basic setup between [us] was upset,” making him rely on Wolfe, as he knows the turf blindfolded, speaks eight languages, and translates as he can. Marko’s nephew, Danilo, is paid by both Titoists and Russians while guarding an arms cache for the Spirit of the Black Mountain, who may harbor a spy; in an old Roman fort, Archie avenges Carla, shooting Moscow’s Albanian puppets as they torture Marko’s killer, Peter Zov. In an impressive con job, Wolfe persuades his superior, Gospo Stritar, that they should bring him back to America for “safety”…then turns him over to Cramer.

   In Before Midnight (1955), Wolfe is hired to find out not who shot Louis Dahlmann, but who took the answers in a million-dollar perfume contest from his body. The novellas in Three Witnesses (1956) also premiered in The American Magazine: “The Next Witness” (as “The Last Witness,” May 1955), “When a Man Murders…” (May 1954), and “Die Like a Dog” (as “The Body in the Hall,” December 1954). “When a Man Murders…” introduces Tim Evarts, described as the Hotel Churchill’s “first assistant security officer, not to be called a house dick,” in Before Midnight; we also learn that “Only two assistant district attorneys rate corner rooms, and [ADA Irving] Mandelbaum wasn’t one of them.”

   In “The Next Witness,” Archie sees him “perform in a courtroom” for the first time as he tries to convict theatrical producer Leonard Ashe for strangling stage-struck Marie Willis and questions employer Clyde Bagby, the president of answering service Bagby Answers Ink.

   She reportedly refused to perform a “special service” eavesdropping on Ashe’s wife, ex-actress Robina Keane, and intended to warn her idol; subpoenaed to testify, Wolfe had turned down Ashe, who says he was summoned to Bagby’s office by an anonymous call, arriving to find her dead. On deck after Bagby, Wolfe risks a fine by taking Archie there to prevent a “justicial transgression” by refuting Mandelbaum’s thesis and clearing Ashe.

   Wolfe seeks to question employees Helen Weltz — now off-duty — Alice Hart, and Bella Velardi, but new receptionist Pearl Fleming was not working there then. Alice, like Lily Rowan, owns a Van Gogh, allegedly bought with her savings; Bella claims she makes her race-track bets on behalf of friends, while Helen has a Jaguar and may have been Marie’s rival for the affections of Guy Unger. Bearding Helen in her Westchester summer rental, and now officially AWOL, they find Guy with her, but although Wolfe is convinced that the quartet is concealing something, Helen refuses to unload in the presence of Guy, who offers a retainer for undefined investigative services, and they head for Saul’s apartment.

   Spotting Purley on his way in, they detour first to defense attorney Jimmy Donovan, who won’t get Wolfe in to see Ashe, and then to Keane, who will; Helen agrees to meet Wolfe chez Saul, the site of “friendly and ferocious poker” on Saturday nights, escorted there by Archie from Grand Central.

   Cut to the courtroom the next morning when Wolfe takes the stand — placed under arrest and threat of a contempt charge by Judge Corbett. Questioned by Mandelbaum, he says Ashe tried to hire him to learn Marie’s identity and propose the eavesdropping, and relates their conversation just one hour ago, noting that an answering service could be a goldmine for a blackmailer, before he is cross-examined by Donovan.

   â€œAs a witness for the prosecution, with a warrant out for my arrest, I was in a difficult situation,” but this stratagem allows Wolfe to get “information which cast a reasonable doubt on his guilt…before the court and the jury…” He concluded that the suspiciously well-off operators had colluded in an eavesdropping conspiracy — as Helen confirmed — with Guy and Bagby, and that Marie became a threat when she’d refused their orders to accept Ashe’s proposal. Wolfe fingers Bagby as the killer; Corbett dismisses the charge of contempt; Ashe shows his appreciation with “a handsome check,” despite not being a formal client; and the case is solved in a narrative set completely outside the brownstone.

   â€œDie Like a Dog” finds Archie trying to return a raincoat to Richard Meegan, who took his by mistake after Wolfe declined to take on a marital case, but arriving at his building, Archie sees Purley on the way in (again) and a black Labrador retriever that follows him, fetching his wind-blown hat. He mischievously brings “Nero” home, perhaps forgetting the rage displayed by Wolfe — who says he had a dog as a boy — at the injustice to Nobby from In the Best Families (1950). Archie’s call to trace his tag number elicits a visit from Cramer, revealing that owner Philip Kampf was strangled in that building, also occupied by lawyer Victor Talento, painter Ross Chaffee, and night-club performer Jerome Aland.

   Arguing that Archie is obliged to see to his welfare, Wolfe refuses to let Cramer take Jet (as he calls him), whose leash was the murder weapon, to Arbor Street to see which door he goes to; to resolve the situation by solving the murder, he sends Archie back with the raincoat. Seeing Talento leaving, Archie tips him off that he’s being tailed by the police, and agrees to make excuses to singer Jewel Jones at their rendezvous in exchange for his pledge to see Wolfe the next morning.

   She comes immediately, and is recognized by the dog (real name: Bootsy), having formerly lived in what is now Meegan’s apartment and been intimate with Kampf, but says they had no quarrel, and Talento is merely her friend.

Wolfe consents to Cramer’s experiment with dog expert Sgt. Loftus, provided Archie is present; Aland credits Bootsy’s dislike to a misunderstanding at a party chez Kampf, and Meegan claims never to have seen him, while Talento and especially Chaffee seem to be on good terms with Bootsy.

   Willfully assumed to be a cop, Archie questions Aland, who got his job through Jewel, and Pittsburgh commercial photographer Meegan, who sought his estranged wife, Margaret Ryan. After seeing her depicted in Chaffee’s Three Young Mares at Pasture, he took the now-vacant apartment in the hope of locating her, since he disbelieved Chaffee’s claim that he couldn’t remember her among his numerous models.

   On a hunch, Archie infiltrates the home of Chaffee’s frequent buyer Herman Braunstein, photographs the painting — which he’d recently lent to the Pittsburgh Art Institute — and confirms that Jewel is Mrs. Meegan.

   Brought to the brownstone, she says she feared for her life due to Dick’s jealousy, and when Wolfe summons the tenants, the rest of whom concealed knowledge of her from Meegan, Cramer and Purley crash the party. Bootsy, it transpires, had followed not Archie but the coat, in reality Kampf’s; having inadvertently switched coats not once but twice, Meegan strangled Kampf (who’d threatened to expose Jewel if she did not resume their relationship), and unwittingly put Archie’s coat on him.

   The second season of A&E’s A Nero Wolfe Mystery included the consecutive episodes “The Next Witness” (4/21/02) and “Die Like a Dog” (4/28/02), both directed by repertory player James Tolkan and adapted by the redoubtable Sharon Elizabeth Doyle. Shown internationally in a double-length version, “The Next Witness” upgrades Mandelbaum (Wayne Best) to D.A. and — unlike the novella— includes Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), who gleefully serves Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) and Archie (Timothy Hutton) personally. They arrive two hours late, eliciting sarcasm from Corbett (Beau Starr); the “Smelly Woman” (Carolyn Taylor) beside Wolfe, applying perfume, is the straw breaking the camel’s back.

   Bagby (Boyd Banks) circumvents labor-law restrictions by having his operators provide their 24-hour service while living and working in the same apartment, so Pearl (Kathryn Zenna) takes a board while Wolfe questions Alice (Nicky Guadagni) and Bella (Christine Brubaker) in their rooms. In Katonah, he notes that Helen (Francie Swift) is “on the edge of hysteria,” and as he confers privately with Guy (Richard Waugh), she breaks down in tears walking with Archie.

   The latter declines to call Donovan (Robert Bockstael) — who as a sworn officer of the court would have to serve the warrants — and after leaving Keane (Rebecca Jenkins), they head for Saul (Conrad Dunn) with no sign of Purley (R.D. Reid).

   In a scene taken straight from Stout, and expanded for the international version, first-time visitor Wolfe commends Saul for “A good room. Satisfactory. I congratulate you,” then feasts on beer, sturgeon, paté, pickled mushrooms, Tunisian melon, and three varieties of cheese.

   Doyle depicts the start of the meeting at which he shares his theories with Ashe (David Schurmann), merely related in the novella on the stand. Under Donovan’s cross-examination, as Wolfe begins to unfold the story of the blackmail operation that included Marie (Brittney Banks) and was run by Alice, Archie’s timely warning to the guard stops her, Bella, and Guy from making a beeline to the exit once they realize that the jig is up…

   Interestingly, while director Tolkan doubles as Loftus in “Die Like a Dog,” the episodes shared no repertory players (so defined, if you’re curious, as those appearing in three or more adaptations), who filled all other roles except the policeman played by Robbie Rox, also seen in “Cop Killer” (8/11/02).

   As usual, Doyle dramatizes events just alluded to by Stout, e.g., Meegan (Bill MacDonald) grabbing the raincoat while leaving in a huff; when Archie returns, she retains his mention of Fritz’s turtle and Theodore’s parakeets, perhaps for the only time in the canon. Seeing Bootsy/Ebony/Inky/Jet/Nero (Jessie and Guinness) while announcing dinner, Fritz (Colin Fox) wryly asks, “Is the animal dining with you?”

   Kari Matchett — whose roles range from Wolfe’s adopted daughter to Archie’s recurring romantic interest, Lily Rowan — is properly seductive as Jewel, intercepted on behalf of Talento (Alex Poch-Goldin). After the experiment with Chaffee (Steve Cumyn), Aland (Julian Richings), and the others fails, Wolfe explains that Bootsy showed no interest in the spot where Kampf was found because he was clad in, first, Meegan’s coat, and then Archie’s.

   Leaving the dog in care of a cabbie (Angelo Tsarouchas), Archie risks letting the tenants assume he is a cop, having been arrested for the same stunt in Prisoner’s Base (1952) by Lt. Rowcliff, aptly also played by MacDonald (suitably abrasive as Meegan).

   In Wolfe’s office, the terrified Jewel says that Kampf “had to go see Dick again anyway, because Dick had gone off with his raincoat. Phil thought it was funny that Dick had his raincoat and he had Dick’s wife. I’ll bet that’s just what he told you, hunh?…that I was coming back to him, and he thought that was a good trade — a raincoat for a wife.” The novella, if not the episode, ends with the implication that Bootsy, who “responds to Jet now,” will remain in residence at the brownstone. But I will not be surprised if, like the aforementioned alleged pets or Felix’s “beloved” parrot in the Odd Couple episode “It’s All Over Now, Baby Bird” (12/3/70), Albert, he will never be seen or heard about again.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Might as Well Be Dead

Editions cited —

     Three Men Out, The Black Mountain: Bantam (1955)
     Before Midnight: Bantam Crime Line (1993)
     Three Witnesses: Bantam (1957)

Online sources —

GIL BREWER – The Red Scarf. Crest 310; paperback reprint, July 1959; cover art by Robert McGinnis. Hardcover: Mystery House, 1958. Stark House, paperback, 2-in-1 edition with A Killer Is Loose, June 2018. First published in Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine, November 1955 (probably abridged).

   Roy Nichols has a dream. A mediocre dream, maybe. But it’s his. To run a motel with his wife, who he adores. He’s got the motel. And he’s got the wife. The problem is, the motel is in the red, and the bank’s gonna foreclose if he can’t come up with a lump sum quick.

   So Roy visits his rich brother. Who turns him down. I’m doing it for you, he says. Wouldn’t want to hurt your pride by giving you the money. Plus, it’s bad for you to be beholden to anybody. Best thing is to pull yourself up by your bootstraps — stop relying on other people to bail you out.

   So that’s that. No money. And he doesn’t know what the hell he’s gonna do now. Except lose the hotel, and his dreams, and disappoint his wife who deserves better. Who deserves the world.

   He decides to hitchhike home to save what little money he has left.

   There’s a Bonnie & Clyde looking couple at the greasy spoon, and he flirts with the sexy Bonnie and gloms himself a ride. Then they crash and there’s a briefcase. With all the money you’d ever need. Plenty to pay off the bank and much besides.

   But the money ain’t free and clear. It’s mob money. And hot.

   The Clyde-looking guy looks asdead as a crash test dummy, so our protagonist and the Bonnie-looking lass make a run for it. To help her get away, she promises half the money. And all of her body. And he accepts. Lustily.

   He hides her out in a room in his motel. And the mob shows up.

   Roy Nichols is such an asshole it’s hard to root for him. He says he loves his wife, and she is clearly devoted to him, and beautiful. Yet he’s a complete douchebag, sleeping with whatever the cat dragged in and lying about it. If he reminds me of anybody, maybe it’s William H. Macy in Fargo. He’s a greedy wimp. He’s hard to root for.

   So when the mob comes to town you figure he’ll finally wake up and get the cops involved. But no. Not Roy Nichols! He’s going to outsmart the mob, pay off his bank loan, and things are gonna be milk and honey from here on out.

   Except the mob isn’t nearly as stupid as Roy Nichols thinks. And neither is his wife.

   He’s a loser who keeps on losing. You don’t like him enough to care if he succeeds. You don’t hate him enough to care if he fails. So, at the end of the day, I just didn’t care what happened one way or the other.

   You’ve heard of love/hate relationships. With Gil Brewer I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve got more of a somewhat-appreciate/hate relationship with him. A Killer Is Loose and 13 French Street are quite successful in their way. Kind of perverted John D. MacDonald/Jim Thompson standalones. Which is high praise.

   But Brewer’s always got a creepy vibe. His protagonists are all lecherous. Even when they think they’re being stand-up guys, every woman they see, they want. And not in an upfront Mike Hammer way. More in a side-eyed repressive lust that takes whatever’s there, and wants whatever isn’t. Vulturous. Sepulcherous. Whatever carrion it can carry away.

   It just leaves me standing there. Mouth agape. Rubber-necking. Shaking my head in disgust.

PHILIP R. CRAIG – Death on a Vineyard Beach. J. W. Jackson #7. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1996. Avon, paperback, 1997.

   This is a series I’ve quit a couple of times because of stupid plots. Oh, well …

   J. W. and his nurse ladylove Zee finally get married, and are no sooner hitched than a rich old man with a shady background who lives on the island wants J. W. to look into an attempt on his life; one that J. W. had serendipitously foiled on their Boston honeymoon. Now Zee is reluctantly taking handgun lessons, and hoping she won’t need them …

   First, let me say that I liked this better than any of this series I can remember. There was no plot foolishness, no cowboy action, and remarkably little violence; just a decent story with believable characters.

   There’s a bit of Robert Parker in Craig’s writing. He likes to describe meal preparation in some detail, and some of the dialogue between Jackson and Zee is a bit reminiscent of the earlier, less egregious Spenser/ Susan relationship.

   I never had any Problems with Craig’s prose, and I still don’t. His first-person narration is well-paced, and he gives a good feel for Martha’s Vineyard without going overboard. Craig finally wrote the kind of book I like to read. Took him long enough, though.

KATHLEEN MOORE KNIGHT – Three of Diamonds. Elisha Macomber #15. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1953. Detective Book Club, hardcover, three-in-one edition.

   The detective of record in Three of Diamonds is one Elisha Macomber, chairman of the Board of Selectmen of Penberthy Township, Penberthy Island, Massachusetts, a man perhaps in his 70s. Although there is a Chief of Police on the island (think Nantucket), whenever there is a serious crime (murder, for example), he is the one who is charge of the investigation that follows, and over the years, there were quite a few. (See the list below.)

   He’s off stage for much of this one, however. The action centers instead around the Crockett family, long time residents of the island, an older woman who lords it over a young sister and brother, both used to living under her thumb all their lives. In a pottery barn out back live a husband and wife, plus a young female assistant, not, as it turns out, all that harmoniously

   It is the younger brother Titus, not generally considered to be the smartest whip in the barrel, who finds the body, shot between the eyes. But when others go to find it, the body is gone. At the scene of the “crime,” however, is a playing card. The three of diamonds.

   It is difficult to solve a murder, obviously, when there is no body to be identified, if indeed there was a body. Macomber is convinced, however, and does more than due diligence to determine what indeed had happened. The case also involves some recent strangers on the island, who may be connected with some jewel robberies up in Boston,

   There is a chapter or two soon before the ending in which all of the participants in the tale spend their time skulking around in the dark, following each other at times, and in at least one instance, one hitting another over the head. The ending itself is one of those all of the suspects together kind of affairs, in which the obvious suspect sits there with Elisha in charge with a entire collection of least likely suspects.

   One might suspect that author Kathleen Moore Knight would things index control at this point, but she does not. What follows is a fast-paced mixture of confusion and chaos that could easily boggle your mind, if you were to let it. It is better just to sit back and fasten your seat belts. The ending of this one is a doozie!
   

      The Elisha Macomber series —

Death Blew Out the Match (1935)
The Clue of the Poor Man’s Shilling (1936)
The Wheel That Turned (1936)
Seven Were Veiled (1937)
Acts of Black Night (1938)
The Tainted Token (1938)
Death Came Dancing (1941)
The Trouble At Turkey Hill (1946)
Footbridge to Death (1947)
Bait for Murder (1948)
The Bass Derby Murder (1949)
Death Goes to a Reunion (1952)
Valse Macabre (1952)
Akin to Murder (1953)
Three of Diamonds (1953)
Beauty Is a Beast (1959)

THE GIRL IN THE KREMLIN. Universal International Pictures, 1957. Zza Zza Gabor, Lex Barker, Jeffrey Stone, Maurice Manson, Kurt Katch. Screenplay by Gene L. Coon & Robert Hill. Story by DeWitt Bodeen & Harry Ruskin. Directed by Russell Birdwell. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   
   This twisty and twisted little thriller mostly from the Universal back-lot and sets from the horror movies is something of a cross between a Men’s Sweat Mag, the National Enquirer, Sterling Noel’s bestselling I Killed Stalin, and a government propaganda short.

   We open in Moscow at Joseph Stalin (Maurice Manson)’s deathwatch. A team of surgeons, including a noted plastic surgeon and nurse Greta Grisenko (Zza Zza Gabor) are there to operate on Stalin, but first he has to indulge his fetish for watching women have their heads shaved and oversee the murder of his double before the operation and the announcement of his death as he absconds from the USSR with half the national treasury.

   Several years have passed and we are in West Berlin where American Private Eye Steve Anderson (Lex Barker) and ex-OSS agent meets Lili Grisenko (also Zza) a naturalized American who hires him to find her sister who went missing in Russia after they were separated as war refugees and who was known to have been a nurse for Stalin.

   Steve’s friend, one-armed Mischa (Jeffrey Stone), who runs an underground group of Russian expatriates, informs Steve and Lili that he believes Stalin is still alive and that their best chance to find Greta is to find Stalin. That best chance to find the dictator turns out to be his son Jacob (William Schallert) who defected to the West in the War to escape the influence of his evil father and now hides out in a small German village trying to forget his Father, protected by Mischa and his friends.

   Meanwhile both Stalin in his hideout and the Russians in Moscow who don’t want his treachery out  send assassins to kill Anderson before he can find the dictator.

   Stalin’s son (a surprisingly sensitive performance by Schallert for this film) provides them the clue they need to find Stalin, and Anderson polishes off one of the assassins and neutralizes the other (a once wartime friend), while he and Mischa are off to find Stalin who is planning to return to Russia and take power again for a finale of suggested kinky sex (Greta allows Stalin to shave her head for kicks and tortures Steve) and a retribution ending to that first line I quoted.

   
   The Girl in the Kremlin is more interesting than good, sensational and exploitative without ever achieving the kind of pulp level garishness required for that to work and despite a few kinky flourishes –- notably the really disturbing and near pornographic scene in the opening when a peasant girl’s (Natalie Daryll who allowed her waist length hair to be shaved) hair is graphically shorn while Stalin watches intently — it never really manages to wallow in the depths it seeks. It is far too polite for that.

   Barker is appropriately tough in the lead, and Zza Zza is actually fairly good in the twin role, avoiding too much scenery chewing as the evil sister in her bald cap, the big reveal of the film’s second half, along with Barker, bare-chested of course, being whipped by two women. There is even a touch of mystery as we don’t know until the end which of the men is Stalin in his new face.

   This does capture the feel of those popular Men’s Sweat Mags of the era where the garish covers and provocative illustrations and article titles always promised more than the prose dared to deliver. This film is like that but, to borrow a line from Ian Fleming, it reads better than it lives, ending with a title card to inform us piously that man reaps what he sows.

   That sums up this one. You went for Rocky Horror Picture Show and you ended up with Scooby Doo.
   

MICHAEL SHAYNE “Man on a Raft.” Unsold TV Pilot. Aired on the NBC summer replacement series Decision, 28 September 1958. Cast: Mark Stevens (Michael Shayne), Merry Anders (Lucy Hamilton), Robert Brubaker (Tim Rourke), Robert Stevenson (William Gentry). Guest star: Diane Brewster. Teleplay by Steve Fisher, based on thee characters created by Brett Halliday. Directed by Mark Stevens. Currently streaming here on YouTube.

   The summer replacement series that replaced The Loretta Young Show for 13 weeks in 1958 consisted entirely of pilot episodes for various series, most of which never came to fruition. The first one shown was picked up, though, and went on to considerable success, that being The Virginian, starring James Drury.

   Not so for this early attempt to get a Mike Shayne series on the air. (The one starring Richard Denning as Shayne came along later.) In it a young good-looking girl comes to Shayne for help in determining when her playboy husband died. He lost his life in a boat at sea, and a good deal of money depends on whether he died before or after his birthday. The other two men on the boat survived, but barely, and the only way of determining what actually happened is by means of a diary one of them kept.

   You can take it from there, but as usual with private eye shows on television, thirty minutes of running time (less time-out spots for would-be commercial buyers) is not enough for more than a bare bones mystery to develop. Other than Mark Stevens as Shayne, none of the rest of the regulars had time enough to make an impression, and Stevens would not have been my choice of an actor to play him. He’s a little too dour for my tastes. In his series Denning looked as though he was having fun playing the role.