MEET ME AFTER THE SHOW. 20th Century Fox, 1951. Betty Grable, Macdonald Carey, Rory Calhoun, Eddie Albert. Screenplay:Richard Sale & Mary Loos. Director: Richard Sale.

   A rift develops between the star of a Broadway musical and her producer-director husband. When amnesia strikes, she heads straight for Miami, with seven years missing from her life – or so she says.

   Pure corn. On the other hand, Betty Grable seems ten times the glamorous movie star in this creaky vehicle than she did seven years earlier, in Pin-Up Girl [reviewed here]. Her strength was in musical comedy, and she made the most of it.

 JAMES SAVAGE – Girl in a Jam. PI Chuck Merrick. Avon T-356, paperback original, 1959. [Cover art said to be by Ernest Chiriacka.]

   This is probably PI Chuck Merrick’s only recorded case, and Al Hubin doesn’t even seem to know about this one. [This oversight has most assuredly been corrected by now.] He works for a large agency centered in Memphis, but this case takes him down to a small town in Georgia.

   Where his client is the female head of an electronics firm being plagued by sabotage. She is young, beautiful, has a graduate education, and on the front cover she is wearing a brassiere, Merrick calls he “Baby,” tucks her into bed and goes out to solve the case.

RANDALL GARRETT – Too Many Magicians. Lord Darcy #1. Doubleday, hardcover, 1967. Previously serialized in Analog SF, Aug-Nov 1966. Curtis, paperback, 1969. Ace, paperback, September 1979.

   Any number of writers have been successful at blending crime and science fiction, but no one has done it better than Randall Garrett in his Lord Darcy series. On the one hand, the Lord Darcy stories are meticulous science-fictional extrapolations — tales of an alternate-universe Earth in the 1960s in which the Plantagenets have maintained their sway, a king sits on the throne of the Western World, and not physics but thaurnaturgic science (magic, that is) is the guiding field of knowledge. On the other hand, they are pure formal mysteries of the locked-room and impossiblecrime variety, ingeniously constructed and playing completely fair with the reader.

   Too Many Magicians is the only Lord Darcy novel, and so delightful and baffling that a 1981 panel of experts voted it one of the fifteen all-time best locked-room mysteries. When Master Sir James Zwinge, chief forensic sorcerer for the city of London, is found stabbed to death in a hermetically sealed room at the Triennial Convention of Healers and Sorcerers, it seems no one could have committed the crime; indeed, there is no apparent way in which the crime could have been committed.

   Enter Lord Darcy, chief investigator for His Royal Highness, the duke of Normandy, and Darcy’s own forensic sorcerer, Master Sean O’Lochlainn. Using a combination of clue gathering, observation, ratiocination, and magic, Darcy and Master Sean sift through a labyrinth of hidden motives and intrigues and solve the case in grand fashion.

   This truly unique detective team also appears in eight novelettes, which can be found in two collections — Murder and Magic (1979) and Lord Darcy Investigates (1981). The former volume contains one of Anthony Boucher’s favorite stories, the wonderfully titled “Muddle of the Woad.”

   These, too, are clever crime puzzles; these, too, are rich in extrapolative history and the lore of magic; and these, too, are vivid and plausible portraits of a modem world that could exist if Richard the Lion-Hearted had died from his arrow wound in the year 1199- — a world that resonates to the clip-clop of horse-drawn hansoms and carriages (for of course automobiles were never invented) and through which the shade of Sherlock Holmes happily prowls.

———
   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.

GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD – Face to the Sun. Michael Joseph, UK. hardcover, 1988.

   
   Our light fingered hero is a young Englishman Edmund Hawkins, a descendant, on the “wrong side of the sheets” of British privateer Admiral Sir John Hawkins, and while Edmund’s crime is committed in that most British of institutions, Harrods, like his ancestor he is in fairly short order going to by laying siege to the Spanish Main.

   Personable and intelligent with a degree to his name his prospects seemed fairly good, starting his professional life earlier in a luxury Spanish resort, and then getting a fabulous job with the President of an African country who took a liking to him. But then he said the wrong thing to the wrong Chief of Police and he found himself no longer collecting his fabulous salary, fleeing the country with only the clothes on his back, and landing back in England with no money, no luggage, no family or influential friends, and no references.

   When his stomach and spine start to get acquainted, he decides to try his hand at petty crime while his clothes are still respectable enough to give him a shot at getting away with it and spies two women at lunch at Harrods with a bag that a man could pass off as a valise.

   At first he is quite pleased with the take, a tidy sum of cash, but then he notices what else is in the bag, a rather large emerald in a gold setting. At this point his life in crime starts to spiral out of control.

   Face to the Sun is the final novel of legendary thriller writer Geoffrey Household whose career spanned from the 1930’s to the 1980’s with career highlights like Rogue Male, A Rough Shoot, Watcher by the Threshold, Fellow Passenger, The Courtesy of Death, Dance of the Dwarfs, Rogue Justice, and The Sending across that long period in the spotlight.

   Final novels are, as lovers of books know, often troublesome things. Most of us have been burned by some favorite writer not quite being up to their best on their later outings, particularly that tricky last book. Raymond Chandler (who attended the same school as Household and P. G. Wodehouse and C. S. Forester, Dulwich) and Playback, Ian Fleming and The Man With the Golden Gun, Dorothy L. Sayers and Busman’s Honeymoon are examples. It’s an area filled with potential land mines, the writer’s age, health, just seeming out of date or out of step with the times, the creator sick to death of the creation, even reader expectations can all sabotage the process. Sometimes, as in the case of Chandler, age, health, drinking, grief, and the pressure to inject more violence and sex into his work all combined.

   Luckily Household manages to bypass all that with an entertaining read in his picaresque mode, with a sort of Ealing Comedy crossed with Graham Greene style adventure, in the tongue in cheek mode of Fellow Passenger, The Life and Times of Bernardo Brown, Olura, and his short fiction such as “Brandy for the Parson”.

   In short order Edmund will learn the women he stole the jewel from is the Evita-like wife of the Peron style dictator of a South American country and her daughter, Lady McMurdie. He will also quickly discover that the gem in question, la Punchada, is a treasured relic whose possession bestows with it the trust of the majority of the people. Lose the emerald, a copy of an Incan symbol, and lose the country.

   After meeting with the women, who would rather no one knows it was stolen, to arrange a quiet bit of blackmail to restore his failed prospects Edmund finds himself kidnapped by the beautiful Teresa and the not particularly loyal opposition. He escapes from that and meets with Lady McMurdie’s Scottish archaeologist husband, Sir Hector, who admits he married his wife in part for money and suggests Edmund come along with them back to South America as a sort of baby sitter to the emerald.

   Hector proves one of those familiar characters in Household’s fiction who is charming, likable, and not entirely honest about his motives, but then neither is our hero at every turn.

   Edmund, thinking it might be safer than waiting to be captured and tortured again, agrees and finds himself caught in a three way revolution replete with a likable Communist, the dangerous but amorous Teresa, the President and his Wife, threats to life and limb, torture, and eventual status as something of a mix between a Conradian hero and a South American T. E. Lawrence, and at least one big friendly dog.

   Household had one of the most successful careers in the genre over decades mixing a real gift for suspense with an eye for both terror and comedy. He delved in horror, fantasy, science fiction, and of course the thriller and never really left his comfort zone of the adventure story. His seven league boots as a younger man meant he was as comfortable in Spain, the Middle East, South America, and Africa as the English countryside, and his early reading of Stevenson, Conrad, and John Buchan meant his grounding in the novel of chase and pursuit and portrayal of one lone man pitting his wits against an army of pursuers was superior to most.

   It is there, in the portrait of a man on the run, hunted yet determined to fight back that Household holds his own with Stevenson and Buchan the two Scots masters of that most feral of story. Grim, romantic, and wild in terrain and weather reading their work is an almost physical ordeal, best done in a comfy chair or bed while the winds howl outside. Nothing is quite as satisfying as nursing a warm drink while one of their protagonists suffers wet, cold, and fear in our stead.

   The genre will not see the likes of Household, Canning, Innes, Lyall, MacKinnon, MacLean, Higgins, and Bagley again, I fear, but they left behind a small library of classic books, and Household managed to go out on the same professional high note that marked his career from The Third Hour (1937) to Face to the Sun (1988).

,

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Twentieth Century Fox, 1945. Fred MacMurray, Joan Leslie, June Haver, Gene Sheldon, Anthony Quinn. Director; Gregory Ratoff.

   A young man classified 4-F finds a magic lamp and wishes himself into uniform – in George Washington’s army at Valley Forge. He also ends up saving Christopher Columbus from mutineers and is suckered into buying Manhattan from the Indians.

   Fred MacMurray’s clumsy mannerisms are engaging but wear thin surprisingly quickly. As a singer, though, well, he makes a fine comedian. This ditsy approach to history is good for a laugh or two, but it’s also terminally silly.

CHARLOTTE MacLEOD – The Corpse in Oozak’s Pond. Professor Peter Shandy #6. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1987; paperback, March 1988.

   The annual Groundhog Day celebration at Balaclava Agricultural College is disrupted by the discovery of a body floating in Oozak’s Pond (up above the methane plant). Since Chief Ottermole is more than willing, Professor Peter Shandy has another case to solve.

   There are soon two more bodies, and a lawsuit against the college, all involving the many (many) members of the Buggins family. This is a “laugh out loud” sort of book, but the ending is such a muddle you would not want to read this as detective story at all.

SISU. Finnish, 2022. Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolin. Written and directed by Jalmari Helander.

   A top-notch, gritty, down-and-dirty action film — mostly.

   Sisu  opens in 1944 as the Germans are being driven out of Finland in a scorched-earth retreat, destroying roads, bridges, farms, villages… well, pretty much everything and anyone in their path.

   Far away from all this, Aatami (Tommila) a Finnish ex-commando has shrugged off the war and gone prospecting, He strikes gold, loads up his riches, and heads back to Civilization, only to find Civilization ain’t what it used to was, and getting there won’t be no picnic neither. He’s stopped by retreating German soldiers determined to kill him and take his gold. He fights back and….

   …and that’s pretty much the plot here, folks: the Nazis chase, shoot, stab, drown, and hang Aatami, and eventually get his gold. Then he chases, shoots, stabs, etc. the Nazis to get his gold back.

   To his credit, writer/director Helander keeps this grim enough to be almost not-unbelievable. Everyone in the movie is dirty, unshaven, lean and hungry. When Aatami gets wounded, he screams and bleeds convincingly, and when the bad guys get killed, it’s done with a seriousness that lends a certain significance to their brief moment of screen time and carries Sisu well beyond the sort of thing Tom Cruise does. Until…

   About fifteen minutes before the end credits scroll, someone decided to nuke the fridge, and about the time Aatami hitches a ride on the belly of an aging bomber plane, hanging on the handle of his miner’s pick, I began to feel a twinge of Damn Silliness. And when he emerges from a particularly explosive event, scathed but game, I could almost hear ghostly echoes of the theme from Mission Improbable   in the not-too-distant distance.

   But maybe I’m expecting too much. Sisu is just a movie, after all. ’Tain’t like it was an actual War, nor anything else to take seriously. It’s a fun movie, too, and one that does a capable job of entertaining a public raised on bread and circuses. But for a while there, it’s a film to be taken seriously, and enjoyed on a more mature level. And I kind of miss the movie they didn’t make of this.
   

BRIAN GARFIELD – Hopscotch. M. Evans, hardcover, 1975. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1976. Forge, hardcover/paperback, 2004. Film: AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1980 (with Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson).

   After the debacle with the film version of Death Wish, Garfield produced a number of works in which there is considerable menace and threat of violence, but in which no one actually dies — perhaps to prove to his critics that they were distorting the intent of his work and that he certainly didn’t need to shed copious fictional blood in order to tell a cracking good story. Hopscotch is one of those bloodless works; and testimony to the fact that it is a cracking good story is the Edgar it received for best novel of its year.

   The protagonist is Miles Kendig, an ex-CIA agent forcibly retired at the age of fifty-three, who yearns to be back “in the game.” Bored, traveling in Europe since his retirement, “he’d done everything to provoke his jaded sensibilities. High risks: the motor racing. skiing, flying lessons, the gambling which had been satisfying until his own capacities had defeated its purpose: he’d always been professional at whatever he did and his skins were the sort that took the risk out of it after a while.” He even toys with the idea of becoming a double agent for the Russians, but decides it wouldn’t be worth it: Whatever he is, he is not a traitor.

   Then a mad but irresistible idea overtakes him, triggered by the thought that The Resurrection of Miles Kendig would be a good title for an autobiography. Why not write his autobiography? Why not put into it everything he knows, everything he learned during his long tenure as one of the best spies in the business? Why not, by doing this, set himself up as the object of an international manhunt — Miles Kendig alone against both his former employers and the Soviets? The ultimate exciting game played for the ultimate stakes: his own life.

   Carefully, meticulously, using all the tricks he has learned over the years, he puts his mad idea into operation — a plan that includes getting himself a New York literary agent (one John Ives, a name Garfield later adopted as a pseudonym) and holing up in a place in rural Georgia to write the book. The action literally hopscotches all over the world — Paris, Marseilles, Casablanca, Stockholm, Helsinki, London — and all over the eastern and southern United States as well. Chasing Kendig along the way (and mostly being made to look foolish) are his former CIA compatriots Myerson, Cutler, and Ross, and his former Russian adversary, Mikhail Yaskov.

   Hopscotch bulges with plot and counterplot, with narrow escapes, humor, sex, suspense — all of which add up to a rousing good time for any reader, including those who don’t usually care for CIA-type shenanigans. Also highly recommended is the 1981 film version (which Garfield co-wrote and co-produced), starring Walter Matthau as a somewhat more lighthearted and amusing incarnation of Miles Kendig.

   Garfield has also published several other novels with varying degrees of political content, among them Line of Succession (1972), The Romanov Succession (1974), and The Paladin (1982), the latter a thriller about Winston Churchill. Checkpoint Charlie, a 1981 collection of nonviolent short stories featuring a fat, old, conceited, but nonetheless engaging CIA agent named Charlie Dark, makes use of several characters from Hopscotch — Myerson, Cutter, Ross, and the Russian superspy Yaskov — in subordinate roles.

———
   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.

ALFRED BESTER – Who He? Dial Press, hardcover, 1953. Berkley G-19, paperback, as The Rat Race, February 1956.

   
   If you haven’t pieced it together yet, Who He? is a live television show in the Golden Age of Television, and the frontier town in question is New York, “…we fight, love and adventure on all levels and never bother to distinguish reality from illusion because both are equally living and dangerous.”

   Who He? is both a suspense novel, a dark screwball apocalyptic comedy, a detective story, a savage satire, and a noirish psychological novel worthy of Cornell Woolrich or Patrica Highsmith if they wrote Madmen, as taut as a Hitchcock film, cynical tough and clipped as Howard Hawks, and mad as the Marx Brothers. It is also an affecting romance, a profound comment on the war between the sexes, 1950’s style, and has some of the best dialogue since Raymond Chandler collaborated with Billy Wilder.

   It’s the story of Jacob Lennox, writer for Who He?, a game show that morphed into a popular variety show starring a ventriloquist and one week in Lennox life where he rises, plunges, and rises again from the ashes starting with getting black out drunk on Christmas Eve and stumbling into work the next day to find his precious show has been receiving concerning hate male.

   Jake is a tough guy who grew up on the wrong side of the streets. He is handsome, glamorous, elegant, and meaner than a junk yard dog when he needs be; his only soft spot for his two Siamese cats and Sam Cooper, the actor who shares an apartment with him.

   At first Jake doesn’t think much of the letters, just crank male, but then he begins to believe the threat may be real and someone may well be murdered the next performance of Who He?. Delving into that mystery introduces him to Gabby Valentine, the ex-wife of network honcho Roy Audibon as vicious as he is ignorant and crass, who Jake falls hard for, and in due course Inspector Fink who Jake takes the letters to.

   With Gabby and Sam, he starts to try and put together the puzzle eventually recalling from his black out meeting a mysterious Mr. Knott, who he believes wrote the letters leading to a wild riotous night across Manhattan as he retraces his step and a revelation of who the letters are aimed at.

   Alfred Bester was one of the legends of Science Fiction, best known for his novels The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, both classics of the field that set the genre on its ear and inspired later generations of writers. He also wrote in radio and early television, as well as comic books and two mainstream novels that have both been called Hitchcockian. Judging by Who He? I will have to track the other book down, because this one is a corker.

   Jake Lennox’s week carries him from the pinnacle to the gutter as it spins out of control, Audibon threatening to cancel Who He? to get his wife back, red baiting sponsors boycotting, Jake wheeling and dealing, his whirlwind love affair revealing far more than he or Gabby would like to acknowledge about themselves, and the threat of violence growing ever closer with the most terrible revelation saved for last in a twist worthy of Woolrich, Christie, or Hitchcock.

   I really can’t praise this book enough. It rollicks along at an incredible pace with hardly a pause for a lag. The writing is by turns insightful, savage, biting, gut busting funny, and nerve wracking, while every revelation comes like a cliffhanger in a serial.

   The novel may throw you a bit because it is narrated by a writer friend of Lennox who is off stage for much of the book but telling the story he pieced together from all the participants. It’s a little distracting, but it works, and that’s all that matters and by the end of the book you will understand why it was the best way to tell this story. Just trust Bester. You could not be in better hands..

   Sadly the book is long out of print though I found an ebook copy of it on the Luminist Society site. It more than deserves a new edition if only as a brilliant slice of life portrait of early live television easily comparable if not surpassing Max Erlich’s The Glass Web.

DARK PASSAGE. Warner Bros., 1947. Humphrey Bogar, Lauren Bacall, Bruce Bennett, Agnes Moorehead, Tom D’Andrea. Screenplay by Delmer Daves, based on a novel by David Goodis. Director: Delmer Daves.

   A girl with money unaccountably helps a convict escape San Quentin, then gives him shelter while he is recovering from plastic surgery. Although he was convicted of killing his wife, she is convinced he got a raw deal.

   What a team Bogart and Bacall made! When she looks at him in that special way she had, the screen nearly melts. The story here doesn’t match the magnitude of the stars, but it’s no slouch, especially when Bogart’s *evidence* goes tumbling out the window.