THE SATAN BUG. Mirisch Corporation/United Artists, 1965. George Maharis, Richard Basehart, Anne Francis, Dana Andrews, Edward Asner. Based on the novel by Ian Stuart [Alistair MacLean]. Screenplay: James Clavell & Edward Anhalt. Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Director: John Sturges.

   With all the manpower both in front and behind the cameras, and one woman, I was expecting a lot better film than the on I saw. This is one of the most boring major studio thriller movies I have ever seen. It is dull from the beginning to the end, in spite of the view of Los Angeles from the air in the finale as three men in a helicopter slug it out while a glass flask of deadly toxin rolls around loose in the back seat.

   How could such a scene be dull? It beats me, but it is. Maybe if the first 15 minutes were more interesting — watching a car driving endlessly along a road in the desert to pull into a guarded but totally non-secure government facility, where small handfuls of guards and men in hats and coats and ties walk around talking to each other about things important to them but not to us — not my idea of a way to catch anyone’s interest, not if I were given a chance to make a movie with at least some money to invest into it.

   Maybe if the next half hour or so were not filled with more men in hats and coats and ties talking to each other about a deadly toxin that could kill off the world, but since the scientific facility is guarded by as many as maybe five men, one dog and a couple of wire fences, how serious could they be about it?

   Maybe if the star of the movie, George Maharis, fresh from his success on the TV series Route 66, weren’t as bland as scrambled egg whites. He’s as good-looking as they come, but I can’t overemphasize how clearly his lack of range as an actor shows up on the big screen.

   Maybe if the rest of the cast weren’t so dour and expressionless. Maybe if all of them were all but interchangeable, what with their identical suits and ties and hats. I have never seen so many suits and ties and hats.

   Maybe if they’d actually given Anne Francis something to do. As the only female in the movie to appear for more than a blink of an eye, you’d think they’d come up with a reason why she’s actually in the picture.

   Maybe if the plot weren’t muddled. The basic idea is clear: a madman has gotten his hands on a deadly poison of some kind and we gotta get it back. But the details of who, when and where were more than I could figure out. I suppose I could watch it again, but I was so unimpressed that there is no chance in the world I could sit as long as I just have without experiencing a moment of tension, a modicum even of suspense, or a hint of that maybe, just maybe, a deadly disaster was about to occur.

DANIEL BOYD – Easy Death. Hard Case Crime, trade paperback, November 2014.

   I’m going to repeat the opening paragraph of the comments I wrote about the same author’s very first book, ’Nada, published back in 2010, to wit: I have a semi-formal, strictly unwritten and not always enforced policy against reviewing books written by authors I know personally. But that shouldn’t stop me from telling you about them, now should it? No, I didn’t think so.

   And so. The author’s name on the title page is Daniel Boyd, but that’s a pen name of one of the regular contributors to this blog’s pages. I don’t think it’s a secret, so I don’t think anyone will mind my telling you, including Dan Stumpf, the man behind the moniker and whose reviews of movies, westerns and crime novels just like this one you often see here.

   So this isn’t a review, not quite, but if I start out by telling you, as a regular visitor to this blog — and even if you’re not — that if you haven’t gone out and bought this book already, you should, and that’s a fact.

   The story takes place in a ten hour period following an armored car heist in December 1951, just before Christmas. I kind of assumed that the small town where most of the action takes place in and around was in Ohio. I don’t know where I could have gotten that idea, since a quick skim through right now didn’t turn up anything I could find, one way or the other. In fact it may have been somewhere in the Northeastern portion of the country, but what I did find was a reference to a Carnegie Library.

   Well, they had one of those in my own home town, clear up in the northern extremes of Michigan’s lower peninsula, but I guess it could be anyplace where a blizzard might dump up to three feet of snow.

   Which causes all kinds of havoc, including, and especially so, to the pair of robbers and their boss, a gent by the name of Bud Sweeney, the owner of a local used car lot. Of the two fellows who actually holds up the armored car, one is black, the other white, and the relationship between the two men — they are friends — is as much of the story as what it is that goes wrong.

   Or if I could expand on that, the story is about people, big shots in town and the ones just scraping by, the new lady park ranger — the first woman ever on the job — doctors who love their work and others who maybe don’t, and more.

   But don’t get me wrong. It’s about an armored car heist gone bad, as I said up above, or this book wouldn’t have been published by Hard Case Crime. The book is only 240 pages, just over Gold Medal length, and it can be read in only two or three hours, once you get going on it.

   And you should. My opinion, anyway.

TIMOTHY HARRIS – Good Night and Good-Bye. Delacorte, hardcover, 1979. Dell, paperback, 1980. TV movie: CBS, 1988, as Street of Dreams (with Ben Masters as “Kyd Thomas.”)

   A book more solidly “in the Raymond Chandler tradition” is hard to imagine. From the opening impact of the first page of Chapter One to the ending that comes as inevitably as the passage of time to its sadly depressing conclusion, there is not a single doubt that Timothy Harris has read, devoured, and assimilated the complete works of the master.

   This is not meant as disparagement. The tone and style are Chandler’s. The prose and dialogue are not, quite, but if they aren’t, they are Harris’s own, in a revised and updated typically Californian tale of modern morality.

   Private eye Thomas Kyd, like his Elizabethan namesake, may have a talent for melodrama, but he lives it as well, instead of just telling it. There is a girl named Laura, and it is she whom the story is about. She is a junkie, and a liar, and she is in trouble.

   She meets Kyd, who helps, but she marries a wealthy movie writer named Paul Sassari instead. He is murdered soon after. As she says, “People don’t get much out of knowing me.”

   Kyd is a master of lost causes, a Sir Galahad on horseback, a champion of ladies in distress, but, as he soon discovers, he is not truly a denizen of the fast, jet-paced world of drugs, easy money, and expensive women.

   On the other hand, since he is familiar with life in the shade of shabby sidewalks and sordid secrets, he almost makes out okay. Finer entertainment for the confirmed private eye aficionado is also hard to imagine.

Rating:   A

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   There was but one other book in the series: Kyd for Hire (Dell, paperback, 1978) but published earlier in the UK in hardcover as by Hyde Harris (Gollancz, 1977).

   The two other books by Harris included in Hubin are paperback novelizations of movies: Steelyard Blues (1972) and Heat Wave (1979). According to IMDb, Harris was also the screenwriter for ten films, including Trading Places and Kindergarten Cop.

“The Apprentice Sheriff.” An episode of The Rifleman, 9 December 1958 (Season 1, Episode 11). Cast: Chuck Connors, Johnny Crawford. Guest Cast: Robert Vaughn, Edward Binns, Russell Collins. Written by Barney Slater. Director: Arthur Hiller.

   The ABC western television series, The Rifleman, may have starred Chuck Connors, but in “The Apprentice Sheriff,” a compelling first season episode, it’s a young Robert Vaughn who steals the show.

   Vaughn portrays Dan Willard, a green lawman who has temporarily assumed the job of marshal while Micah Torrence, the “real marshal,” is away. Willard’s got a lot to prove. Because of his poor vision, he had been kicked out of West Point. So to say that he’s got a chip on his shoulder is an understatement.

   We first see Willard (Vaughn) as a reflection in a mirror, with him watching himself handle his guns, the tools of his new trade. It’s the type of scene typically seen more in films noir than in Westerns. It has an immediate unsettling effect upon the viewer, who realizes that he is being told that Willard’s character is going to be the focal point of the episode.

   Willard’s determination to prove his toughness is put to the test when he decides that he’s going to enforce order in town. His immediate targets: a bunch of rowdy cowhands who have just gotten paid. Willard ups the ante with the would-be outlaws when he both puts up a notice requiring they register their firearms and then personally shoots and kills one of the cowhands.

   Lucas McCain (Connors) acts as the voice of reason, trying to convince Willard that wearing a badge doesn’t mean giving up one’s judgment. McCain realizes that Willard is less interested in law and order than in proving his manhood.

   The plot is nothing new, but Vaughn is on the top of his game here, giving a much better performance than in Roger Corman’s Teenage Caveman, which I reviewed here. In this episode, he’s not quite the actor that he would be in his halcyon The Man From U.N.C.L.E. years, but he definitely demonstrates why he had a long future in television in front of him. It’s worth a look.

   The full episode can be watched on Hulu here.

PAUL LEVINE – Solomon vs. Lord. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, 2005.

   This is the first book this long (547 pages) that I’ve actually finished in quite a while. I’ve started some, don’t get me wrong, but they’ve always been put down with me fully intending to pick them up again the very next day, but for whatever reason, good or bad, eventually I never do.

   What’s interesting (to me, anyway) is that the book was marketed as Fiction, not as a Mystery novel, even though both Solomon (Steve) and Lord (Vicky) are lawyers, and much of the book is taken up with with two legal cases, one of them a murder, or so the D.A. assumes.

   What the book really is, though, is a romance. One of those “when will they get together” love stories mostly written by women. Not “will they or won’t they get together,” since that’s a forgone conclusion, even though they are total opposites in character. She’s prim and proper, organized to the max, while he’s the kind of guy who wings it in court, playing even loosey-goosier in legal proceeedings than Perry Mason ever dreamed of.

   They start out on opposite sides of the courtroom, but losing the case to him gets her fired, so of course even though she “hates” him, they end up on the same side, defending a clone of Anna Nicole Smith (fictional) accused of killing her husband after an extended bout of kinky sex.

   She also ends up representing him in his attempt to gain custody of his autistic nephew Bobby, who has been abandoned by his drug-addled mother, which is another story altogether. I also have not mentioned that she (Lord) already has a fiancé, a wealthy, well-bred kind of guy whom women looking for security in their lives would beat down the doors for to grab onto as a husband.

   It is still hard to explain why this book needs as many pages as it does. Perhaps that is where the real mystery comes in. The book is often laugh-out-loud funny and definitely vulgar at times but not verging into even the borderline obscene and never ever as explicit in bedroom details as it might have been if it were a Harlequin romance written under today’s standards.

   It all ends happily, needless to say, with many more adventures in sight.

        The Solomon vs. Lord series —

1. Solomon vs. Lord (2005)
2. The Deep Blue Alibi (2006)

3. Kill All The Lawyers (2006)
4. Trial & Error (2007)

5. Habeas Porpoise (2014)

UNBREAKABLE. Touchstone Pictures, 2000. Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright Penn, Spencer Treat Clark. Screenwriter & director: M. Night Shyamalan.

   This was director Shyamalan’s followup to his massively successful The Sixth Sense, which I’ve never seen, but no matter. The reason I wanted to see this one was the presence in the film of Samuel L. Jackson, who always turns in a riveting performance, no matter how good or how bad the rest of the film is.

   And Unbreakable is no exception to that statement, if not a rule. Whenever he’s on the screen, as the tormented victim of a brittle bone disease, all eyes are on him, an angry black man (with reason) teetering on a cane that looks as though it will barely hold him. As a lover of comic books and comic books heroes — and an early flashback shows why that is so; how the love of comic books got him through his childhood — he knows that there has to be someone on the other end of the spectrum, perhaps even unknowingly.

   And that someone just might be David Dunn (Bruce Willis), an ordinary guy, a stadium security guard by occupation, who just happens to be the only survivor of a horrific train accident. Over a hundred other passengers died; Dunn comes out of it without a scratch.

   Dunn, as I say, is an ordinary guy, with a semi-estranged son and a marriage that is definitely on the rocks, but … he’s never been sick in his life, as Elijah Price (Jackson) reminds him. Could he have superpowers and have never have known it until now?

   As I say, I’m a fan of Samuel L. Jackson, and I still am, but Unbreakable has convinced me that I hadn’t bother seeing another film directed by M. Night Shyamalan, whose directorial abilities I find to be of the flamboyant “look at me, I’m directing” variety, beginning with the very first scene, with Dunn talking earnestly to a young female reporter on the seat next to him on the doomed train. Their conversation is filmed through the separation between the seats in front of them, both awkward and obvious.

   As a storyteller, he is no better — not to my mind anyway, speaking as someone who would like to have scenes mean something, not randomly inserted in a portentous manner, but never followed up on or extremely unlikely to happen in the first place, such as Dunn’s son threatening to shoot him with a gun, to prove that his father does indeed have superpowers.

   As for the surprise ending, I left the theater asking myself just what it was that happened. It did and did not make sense at the time, and while I’m a lot more aware of what I had missed, I think my mind stopped working when I realized that a lot of the movie didn’t make a lot of sense, was weird only for weirdness’ sake, and I failed to take in scenes that were important, and I just didn’t realize that here at last was something that was essential and I really shouldn’t have missed it.

   The movie is still worth watching, though. It was quite popular at the time it was first released, perhaps as a carryover from The Sixth Sense, with which Unbreakable has some strong similarities. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

THE LAST OF THE VIKINGS. Tiberius Film, Italy, 1961. Medallion Pictures, US, 1962. Original title: L’ultimo dei Vikinghi. Also released as El último vikingo (Spain). Cameron Mitchell, Edmund Purdom, Isabelle Corey, Hélène Rémy, Andrea Aureli, Mario Feliciani. Director: Giacomo Gentilomo.

   Although I didn’t have the highest expectations when I started to watch it on DVD last night, The Last of the Vikings, is a surprisingly good “sword-and-sandal” movie. It’s not The Vikings (1958), but for what it is, namely a fairly entertaining escapist action film, it’s not all that bad.

   Directed by Giacomo Gentilomo, (Mario Bava is uncredited), this Italian Viking epic (how’s that for a sub-genre?) stars Cameron Mitchell as Harald, a Viking warrior determined to revenge the death of his father at the hands of the mad King Sveno (Edmund Purdom). Along the way, he both learns what love is, and subsequently falls in love with the beautiful Hilde (French actress-model Isabelle Corey). After numerous obstacles thrown in his path, our fearlessly determined protagonist eventually slays the sadistic Sveno and gets the girl.

   Unlike some other costumers and adventures flics from the same era, Last of the Vikings doesn’t play it light.

   Indeed, there is something very dramatic (in the Shakespearean sense) about the performances in this little-known film. Cameron Mitchell and Edmund Purdom are both very good actors, and it shows. Look in particular for the scene in which Harald (Mitchell) slays a traitor in his midst. Mitchell’s performance is nearly flawless in that moment; he just seems to be a natural actor for portraying leads in revenge dramas.

   Unfortunately, the version of the movie that I watched, a DVD released by Alpha Home Entertainment, has a visual quality that is, well, acceptable, but not much more than that. Since I don’t suppose that anyone will be restoring this movie anytime soon, that may be the best available copy for the foreseeable future.

   That’s a shame, because the actors did take their roles seriously and there is a really great – awesome, really – fight sequence at the end, one that far surpasses most, if not all, digitally manufactured CGI battle sequences.

   Who knows? Maybe there’s a 35mm copy out there somewhere, tucked away in an archive or a private collection, just begging to be watched on the big screen.

  RUFUS KING – A Variety of Weapons. Doubleday, hardcover, 1943; Popular Library #97, paperback, no date [1946].

   Ann Ledrick has become known as an excellent photographer of pets. Thus, or maybe thus, she is hired to take pictures of some pet ocelots at Black Tor, the Marlow estate accessible only by air or, with great difficulty, by horseback. Justin Marlow, fabulously wealthy, has been a recluse at Black Tor ever since his son twenty years earlier was executed for killing his pregnant bride. Marlow’s only desire in life since then has been to prove his son’s innocence.

   During that twenty years, two of the young men who were in love with Marlow’s daughter-in-law have died “accidental” deaths — one by shotgun while hunting, the other after having ingested some perhaps ptomaineous pate de fois gras that had been mailed to him. Other accidental deaths have also taken place on the estate.

   When Ledrick arrives at Black Tor, she finds that there is very little interest in her taking pictures of the cats. Instead, she discovers as Justin Marlow dies, there is another reason for her presence at the Marlow estate. It has to do with the past murder and a very present murder.

   Although not by any means scientifically knowledgeable, I believe King goofed in one area, but it’s an area that isn’t all that significant to the reader. Otherwise, King presents a brooding atmosphere skillfully and portrays Ann Ledrick as a level-headed, intelligent, charming character.

   The detective, Sgt. James Hurlstone, who arrives on horseback because of a storm, is both bright and able. That he adopts a cat at one point in the novel and takes it with him wherever he goes may make him appeal to cat fanciers until they discover the reason for this odd companionship.

Editorial Notes:   It sounds strange to me as well, but I believe this blog has reviewed more of Rufus King’s books than any other author. That it seems to have been a favorite of Bill Deeck may be part of the reason, but he’s been reviewed by others as well. King’s most recent appearance on this blog was a review by Bill of two of his books, The Case of the Constant God and The Case of the Dowager’s Etchings. Prior to that was Bill’s review of The Steps to Murder, worth pointing out since at the end of this review are links to all of the other Rufus King reviews.

  DETOUR TO DANGER. Planet Pictures, 1946. Britt Wood, John Day, Nancy Brinckman, Eddie Kane, Fred Kelsey, Si Jenks, Eddie Parker, Ashley Cowan, Bud Wolfe, Ken Terrell. Screenwriter: Alan James. Producer-directors: Harvey Parry & Richard Talmadge.

   I’m not going to kid you. This is one really bad movie, put together by a group of amateurs, I’d bet you think by looking at the credits, but you’d be wrong. Not about this being a bad movie, since it is, but the men behind it, from the producers-directors on down, all had lengthy careers in the movies. Almost all of them have long lists of movies they were involved with in some way or another, some of them up to 300 entries long, perhaps more, going back to the silent days.

   Mostly in bit roles, to be sure, or as stunt men. The leading man, John Day (John Daheim) and both directors did stunt work in loads of movies. They must have decided to put up the financing together to form Planet Pictures, which made only one other movie, Jeep Herders, also in 1946, and while they also probably went broke very quickly, they must have had a lot of fun doing so.

   The plot is nothing, and it’s poorly told. A gang of payroll robbers are forced to land their getaway plane near a summer resort spot somewhere near Big Bear Lake in southern California, where they mingle with the guests until two fishing buddies, Speedy (Britt Wood, and the funny one) and Steve (John Day, the husky clean-cut one) save the day.

   While the crime solving is inept, the romance is even worse. Things are livened up a little when a runaway excursion wagon filled with screaming girls is saved by the two heroes in their beat-up old jalopy, and a fight scene that lasts the final five minutes, much of it taking place in an another runaway truck careening its way down a narrow mountain road.

   What’s remarkable is that this movie was filmed in color. What’s even more remarkable that this movie still exists today, but only Alpha Video would believe it was worth releasing on DVD.

MICHAEL COX – The Glass of Time. W. W. Norton & Company, hardcover, October 2008; softcover, October 2009.

        “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait.”

   That was Wilkie Collins’ formula for the nineteenth century thriller of the triple-decker variety, and here and in his previous Victorian thriller, The Meaning of Night, Michael Cox more than follows Collins’ advice. There are perhaps fewer laughs, though, in this dark tale of revenge across time and one young woman’s mysterious “Great Task.”

   Her name is Esperanza Alice Gorst, and she has recently arrived at Evenhood where she will enter service as maid to the rather liberal Miss Emily Carteret 26th Baroness of Transor and her sons, Perseus and Randolph Duport.

   Esperanza is no ladies maid, though. She was raised by her guardian Madame in Mansion de l’Orme in France, and only two months earlier she had learned it was her role in something called the Great Task to befriend and grow close to Lady Transor. She does not know why, only that her past is leading her here and her future turns on her success.

   And Lady Transor is something in herself:

   Esperanza’s work would seem cut out for her, for how could a mere maid seduce such a woman of beauty and wealth. Unknown to Esperanza, it will be much easier than she knows, because she has special gifts and advantages she is ignorant of as yet. She cannot know all the intricacies of the Great Task yet, lest she fail.

   Esperanza will rise from maid to companion to daughter in-law to something far higher through the twists and turns, dangers, insanity, and mysteries of this modern triple-decker, with allies and enemies both known and unknown, sympathies, confusion, passion, and cool intellect all spun masterfully out by Cox in an effectively Victorian voice that never-the-less is an easy and pleasant read. There is little to forgive in this novel or his previous book The Meaning of Night, and much to applaud.

   The literary thriller, of which this is a good example, follows two chief tracks, the contemporary version with ties to the past, usually in the form of a valuable object or artifact, The Book of Four; and the historical version, The Name of the Rose.

   This falls in the latter category and manages to evoke not only Wilkie Collins, J. Sheridan LeFanu, and Mary Elizabeth Brandon, but also a touch of Alexandre Dumas and The Count of Monte Cristo, since at heart The Glass of Time is about old injustices, mysterious figures with new identities, lost fortunes, young love, and implacable revenge. Don’t think this will be too dated though. Cox is a masterful story teller and a gifted writer.

   Esperanza is no delicate fainting flower. Despite her innocence she is smart, tough, and ruthless when need be. This is not Little Nell. She proves not only Lady Transor’s equal, but her nemesis, though no one is simply good or evil, nothing simply black and white. This isn’t Rebecca unless there had been two Rebecca’s battling for Manderlay; if it resembles any works from the past it would perhaps be one of the Joseph Shearing novels like Moss Rose, So Evil My Love, or Blanche Fury.

   The Meaning of Night was a hard act to follow, being a variation on Kind Hearts and Coronets, but Cox succeeds admirably with a book that manages to be similar enough to reward those who loved the earlier novel and totally different in its protagonist and her plight.

   I’m deliberately not giving too much away because there are twists and turns and surprises enough to come. If I’ve made it sound stately or dull it is not. It moves, it’s a compulsive page turner, it breathes and lives, the characters are genuine people from heroine to the slightest character, and the setting is splendidly evoked even down to a final revelation on virtually the last page that will likely come as a complete surprise to most readers.

   You won’t find the best of the mystery genre in the mystery section of bookstores today, but among the mainstream novels by talented and canny writers such as Michael Cox. No one does the literary pastiche better or more artfully. This and his first book would be completely at home beside The Woman in White, Uncle Silas, or The Mystery of Edwin Drood.