MURDER BY INVITATION. Monogram, 1941. Wallace Ford, Marian Marsh, Sarah Padden, Gavin Gordon, George Guhl, Wallis Clark, Minerva Urecal, J. Arthur Young, Herbert Vigran. Director: Phil Rosen.

   This Monogram mystery (calling it a B movie would be kind) is another entry in the “dark old house” genre. Reporter Bob White (Wallace Ford) investigates a series of murders at a spooky old house full of secret passages, sliding pictures, greedy relatives, and eyes looking secretly into the room.

   I kept expecting to see Abbot and Costello walk through the door at any moment. Rich Aunt Cassandra’s relatives dragged her into court and tried to have her declared incompetent so that they could gain control of her fortune, but the judge found in her favor even though she likes vinegar on her apple pie.

   So she invites all her relatives spend a week with her at her country mansion so she can decide which one will get the bulk of her estate. But no sooner do they arrive at midnight than one of them is stabbed to death (“She must have seen The Cat and the Canary,” quips White’s secretary when she hears about the midnight invitation).

   When reporter White arrives with his secretary and photographer he is welcomed into the murder scene (yes, a fantasy film…). No sooner does he arrive than the body disappears and another one appears in its place, and then that one disappears also.

   (In an aside Wallace Ford addresses the audience and says that you know you are past the halfway point in a mystery movie when the bodies have disappeared — and this movie is more than half over).

   This is a really goofy movie, not to be taken seriously, but fun to watch. At the end as Bob White starts a long, long kiss with his secretary, the camera pans over to Eddie the photographer and he says something like “The Hays Office isn’t going to like this…”

Rating:   C minus.

THE STOLEN VOICE. World Film Corp., 1915. Robert Warwick, Frances Nelson, Giorgio Majeroni, Violet Horner, Bertram Marburgh. Screenwriter/director: Frank Hall Crane. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   When society matron Belle Borden (Violet Horner) is entranced with the world-famous tenor Gerald D’Orvilie (Robert Warwick) her jealous suitor, the sinister mesmerist Dr. Von Gahl (Giorgio Majeroni) renders D’Orville mute.

   Belle immediately loses interest in the silenced tenor, who travels abroad, exhausting all of his fortune in an attempt to recover his voice. Reduced to utter penury, Gerald is rescued by someone he once salvaged from the refuse heap of humanity, rising to new heights as a silent screen star. When Dr. Van Gahl sees Gerald in his new-found glory on the screen he has a fatal heart attack, which immediately restores Gerald’s voice.

   I’ve skipped over several interesting features of which the most striking is the rescue by Gerald of his co-star from the raging rapids which are pulling her to a violent death. But you’ll get no more details from me. I’ve whetted your appetite enough already. (By the way, I loved the film. Or hadn’t you guessed that already?)

Editorial Note:   Robert Warwick’s movie and television career began in 1914 and did not end until 1962, two years before his death, with a substantial combined 242 total credits on bot screens. Moviewise, his roles seem largely to have consisted of minor roles in bigger films, and bigger roles in B-movies.

   Catching my eye, though, looking down through the list of movies he appeared in, are several he made for Preston Sturges in the early 1940s: The Great McGinty (1940), Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), and Sullivan’s Travels (1941). He was third-listed in the latter, after Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake.

   On the back cover of The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Catherine Ross Nickerson, editor), the blurb tells us that the fourteen essays contained therein represent the “very best in contemporary scholarship.” If so, this should be a matter of grave concern to people interested in the history of the American mystery genre before World War Two.

   As the Companion is a skimpy book of less than 200 pages and it has fourteen essays, potential readers should be immediately clued in to the fact that the essays tend to be rather cursory. A listing of the essays further reveals that the book’s coverage is esoteric, leaving noticeable gaps:

   Further evidence of highly selective coverage can be found in the “American Crime Fiction Chronology” at the beginning of the book. Here are its milestones in crime fiction from 1841 to 1939:

   A pretty obvious pattern can be constructed from these fifteen fictional milestones:

   One would conclude from this list that American men donated practically nothing to the detective fiction genre after 1841 (Poe), outside of the hardboiled variant and juvenile mystery (the authors of the Hardy Boys tales). Apparently the only significant male producers in the nearly 100 years between Poe’s first story and Chandler’s first novel were the creators of Philo Vance and Charlie Chan.

   But it gets even worse when we look at the actual text. S. S. Van Dine gets four mentions, all cursory, some problematic:

   On page 1 his rules for writing detective fiction are mentioned, dismissively.

   On page 29, he is dismissed as an imitator of Agatha Christie.

   On page 43, he is called an imitator of Arthur Conan Doyle and used as the usual hardboiled punching bag for not writing about “reality” (though he interestingly is deemed “the era’s most popular writer”).

   On page 136, it is claimed that The Benson Murder Case is “widely acknowledged as the first American clue-puzzle mystery”

   Earl Derr Biggers gets one line, solely for having created an ethnic detective (see “Race and American Crime Fiction”).

   At least these non-hardboiled make writers are mentioned! The hugely popular and admired genre author Rex Stout is another lucky lad. Though he missed the list of milestones, Stout nevertheless in mentioned in the text:

   On page 47 he is noted for having merged hardboiled and classic styles.

   On page 136, he is criticized, along with Van Dine, for ignoring race and gesturing “more toward Europe than actual American cities” and writing about rich white bankers, stockbrokers and attorneys (yup, “Race and American Crime Fiction” again).

   On the other hand, if you are looking for anything on Melville Davisson Post, Arthur B. Reeve or Ellery Queen, forget it! They did not exist apparently; we only imagined them all these years.

   Meanwhile, Anna Katharine Green gets two pages, Mary Roberts Rinehart three and Mignon Eberhart, Leslie Ford and Mabel Seeley together as a trio another two. (Heck, even the lovably loopy Carolyn Wells gets a line in this book.)

   The editor of the Companion, Catherine Ross Nickerson (author of The Web of Iniquity — a book, you may not be surprised to learn, about Anna Katharine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart — and, in the Companion, of “Women Writers Before 1960”) lectures in her Introduction that:

   This is an interesting idea indeed, but unfortunately Professor Nickerson’s own selective coverage gives us an inaccurate view of the genre and, thereby, surely, of American cultural history.

   According to Nickerson, there were two indigenous creative strains in American mystery: the female domestic novel/female Gothic (the Brontes and Mary Elizabeth Braddon are admitted as influences here but not Wilkie Collins or Sheridan Le Fanu); and the hardboiled.

   It seems that despite the existence of Poe, what we think of as the Golden Age detective novel was an artificially transplanted English import, about as American as scones and crumpets. Nickerson dismissively notes these “Golden Age” works for their “tightly woven puzzles and country houses full of amusing guests” and declares that they were “presided over by Agatha Christie and imitated by Americans like S. S. Van Dine.”

   So if you were an American male writing mysteries that emphasized puzzles and had upper middle class/wealthy milieus, you were part of a British tradition and thus not worthy of inclusion in a historical survey of American mystery fiction. But if you were an American woman writing mysteries with puzzles and upper middle class/wealthy milieus, you were part of the American female domestic novel/Female Gothic tradition (even though some of this tradition is British and male) and you make it into the genre survey.

   Make sense to you? It doesn’t to me. Personally I think Professor Nickerson should take another look at those “connoisseurs and collectors, with their endless taxonomies, lists and value judgments” who she dismisses so casually. There are still things that an academic scholar writing about the mystery genre can learn from them.

   Granted, they often were men who tended to be overly dismissive of women’s mystery fiction — or at least the suspense strain in it that they mockingly termed “HIBK” (Had I But Known) — but writing important men out of the history of the genre is no way to redress the balance.

   Crime literature may be about violence, but scholars of crime literature should not practice “an eye for an eye.” Doing so does not make for good scholarship.

LAWRENCE GOLDMAN – Tiger by the Tail.   David McKay, hardcover, 1946. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, 4-in-1 edition, October 1946. Also: Detective Book Magazine, Summer 1949.

    The detective in this tale, following closely in the footsteps of private eye Max Thursday and police sergeant Joe Friday, is (you guessed it) named Johnny Saturday, top trouble-shooting investigator for a west coast insurance outfit.

    According to Hubin, Saturday was also the leading character in Fall Guy for Murder (Dutton, 1943), a book which I have not seen [but which at long last, thanks to the Internet, I now have on its way to me].

    The scene is Los Angeles, more specifically the Market, the hub of the city’s fresh produce business; the time is right after the war, just as the country is beginning to show signs of getting itself back on its feet again.

    At first the crimes are minor ones, such as sabotage and the hijacking of commodities like grapefruit and lettuce, but what has Saturday worried is a $20,000 policy on a dead man.

    The writing is strictly pulpbound, evoking a period and flavor unmatchable outside the brittle pages of an aging Dime Detective Magazine, say (which, incidentally, cost 15 cents in 1946).

    The plot is complicated, and perhaps it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but in its way I found it wholly representative of an entire era of mystery fiction writing, one that’ll never return.

IMOGEN ROBERTSON – Anatomy of Murder. Headline, UK, hardcover, 2010.

Genre:   Historical mystery. Leading characters:   Harriet Westerman & Gabriel
Crowther; 2nd in series. Setting:   England-Georgian era/1781.

First Sentence:   Captain Westerman was in his cabin reading the letter from his wife for the fourth time when he heard the officer of the morning watch ring Six Bells.

    Mrs. Harriet Westerman and her friend, anatomist Gabriel Crowther, are once again embroiled in solving a murder. However, the stakes are even higher as they deal with treason against England during the Revolutionary War.

    In a much less elegant part of London, a Tarot-card reader sees the impending murder of one of her clients. Although she fails in preventing the murder, she is determined to bring the woman’s killers to justice.

    Beginning with an exciting and dramatic scene, this is one of those can’t-stop-until-I-finish-it books. Ms. Robertson’s writing is atmospheric and insightful with a strong sense of time and place, subtle, wry humor, a marvelous voice and style which evoke the period and the emotions of the characters.

    I found it fascinating to see the Revolution from the English perspective. Harriet, intuitive and more able to relate to others, and Crowther, the cold, analytic scientist, balance each other well.

    Harriet is someone who, as a real person, I should like very much. We learn more of Crowther and his past, which hints of much more to come. I am enjoying the evolution of their relationship despite the differences in the ages and natures.

    All the characters are alive and wonderful. It’s nice to see the characters from the first book, including Molloy, and meet the delightful new characters Jocasta, Sam and Boyo. (I did feel a cast of characters would have been helpful.)

    The captivating plot, good twist, the way in which the threads were brought together was wonderful. Set in 1781 during the Revolution, the story deals with traitors, murder and opera with a touch of the metaphysical. It takes you from the Opera house and salons of the wealthy to the meanest slums of London revealing the apathy and cruelty which resides in each.

    Ms. Robertson is one of the best new-to-me-authors I’ve found this year. Her writing is insightful with interesting observations on celebrity worship, and encourages one to look at things from a different perspective. It is not often that events in a book make me truly cry, but it speaks to speaks to an author’s skill that her writing evokes strong emotion.

    Anatomy of Murder was an excellent read but I recommend starting with her first book. I can’t wait for her next book.

Rating:   Excellent.

    The Harriet Westerman & Gabriel Crowther series —

1. Instruments of Darkness (2009)

2. Anatomy of Murder (2010)
3. Island of Bones (2011)

ACCUSED. BBC-TV, UK. 15 November through 20 December 2010. Featured players, left to right: Mackenzie Crook, Marc Warren, Juliet Stevenson, Naomie Harris, Christopher Eccleston, Andy Serkis, Benjamin Smith & Peter Capaldi. Creator: Jimmy McGovern.

   This was a series of six separate plays (one hour each, no adverts) in which the central character is on trial and we see the story build up by a series of flashbacks of events leading up to the trial.

   We see little of the trial itself until the final verdict which comes just before the conclusion of each story.

   The series seemed promising since the writer was the much respected Jimmy McGovern, the man behind Cracker. It fact it turned out to be a series of unremitting and absolute tosh. I carried on watching story after story thinking that at least one of them must turn out well, but they were all deplorable.

   The stories were designed, I think, to enlist sympathy for the defendant but in that respect (as in all others) they failed in this household. One problem, for this rosy-eyed watcher, was that it was difficult to find a likeable character in the whole series but, even worse, is that the actions of so many of the characters were just unbelievable on so many levels.

   A series to be avoided.

   Lawrence Sanders is an inconsistent writer: he can turn out crud like The Pleasures of Helen and Love Songs, then startle readers with powerful novels like The First Deadly Sin (Putnam, 1973; Berkley, 1974), The Second Deadly Sin (Putnam, 1977; Berkley, 1978), and The Sixth Commandment (Putnam, 1979; Berkley 1980).

   The First Deadly Sin is a one-on-one contest between a psycho named Daniel Blank and Captain Edward X. Delaney of the New York Police Department. Daniel Blank is obviously named by Sanders to represent a person reaching his limit; here’s how Blank sees the city he lives in:

   Blank, divorced and alone, meets the fabulously wealthy Celia Montfort. A strange, sick relationship develops to the point where Blank decides he must prove his love to Celia. He does: Blank randomly picks a victim and kills him.

   Blank returns to Celia and describes his feelings: “It really was pure. I swear it. It was religious. I was God’s will. I know that sounds insane. But that’s how I felt. Maybe it is mad. A sweet madness. I was God on earth. When I looked at people on shadowed streets Is he the one? Is he the one? My God, the power!” (Page 168.)

   The man Blank murdered was Frank Lombard, a Brooklyn city councilman. The politicians of New York scream for vengeance and the inter-departmental maneuvers begin, first to solve the case quickly and reap the glory, later to scapegoat when the random killings continue.

   Delaney, asked by a cabal of police officers to quietly investigate the killings while he’s on leave, quickly comes up with important leads. Sanders plays fair with the reader: The First Deadly Sin is a near 600 page book, but the realistic frustration of following leads that turn out to be dead ends, the frustration of developing evidence, produces a long and involved narrative.

   The character of Delaney, affectionately called “Iron Balls” by his fellow police officers, is interesting because of his toughness and his passion for order. His method consists of building a mental picture of the murderer, piece by piece:

   Blank kills again. And again. Delaney’s mental pictures are still fuzzy. But Blank is slowly losing control: on his job he is aloof and distant. With Celia, with Celia’s brother, Blank’s sex acts become more bizarre. The killings inflame him:

   The eerie picture of Daniel Blank is Sanders’ best writing: convincing and frightening at the same time. If The First Deadly Sin has a major weakness it is its ending. The one-on-one confrontation between Delaney and Blank breaks down and we are left with a drawn-out, frustrating ending.

   The Second Deadly Sin again features Delaney, but this time he’s drawn out of retirement to track down a murderer of a great painter.

   Victor Maitland is stabbed to death and Delaney discovers a dozen suspects who’d like him dead. This is a whodunit, suspenseful and cleverly plotted.

   Through the course of the book, it is Delaney, the character of an experienced and ruthless defender of justice, which overshadows the Maitland murder:

   And, in the conclusion, Delaney forces the one-on-one confrontation and dishes out his own kind of justice.

   The Sixth Commandment is a strange book. The story is told in the first person by Samuel Todd, an investigator for a philanthropic organization. Dr. Thorndecker, a Nobel Prize winner, asks the organization Todd works for for a million dollar grant to support his research.

   The organization has Todd investigate the Thorndecker proposal. Almost immediately, Todd receives an anonymous note: “Thorndecker kills.” Todd visits the site of the Thorndecker facility near the town of Coburn, north of New York City on the Hudson River. Initially he thinks the note is a con:

   But Todd finds this isn’t a simple case of jealousy; there’s murder and madness and horror in Coburn beyond Todd’s wildest nightmares.

   I recommend all three of Sanders’ books I’ve reviewed here. Sometimes the writing is wooden and dull, sometimes the characters are dull and superficial. But whatever Sanders’ faults, the books move with a power and intensity you should experience.

Editorial Notes:  This article appeared before the film version of The First Deadly Sin was released in 1980. The movie’s two leading co-stars were Frank Sinatra and Faye Dunaway, with David Dukes as Daniel Blank. Other books in the series were The Third Deadly Sin (1981) and The Fourth Deadly Sin (1985).

   Other books in the “Commandment” series: Seventh (1991), Eighth (1986), and Tenth (1980). Sanders eventually turned his attention to series character Palm Beach PI Archie McNally, beginning with McNally’s Luck in 1992, although some if not all of the writing is said to have been done by ghostwriter Vincent Gardo.

   There were seven in this lighthearted series under Sanders’ byline. When the latter died in 1998, Gardo wrote another five under his own name.

    George Kelley’s blog can be found online here, where he finds something interesting to review and talk almost every day.

SIMON BRETT – Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King’s Daughter. Felony & Mayhem, softcover, February 2011. British edition: Constable, hardcover, May 2009.

   The name Simon Brett should be no stranger to anyone on these pages. His Charles Paris series about a bibulous actor is held in the highest esteem by lovers of humorous well written mysteries, and for the past decade he has been penning less humorous but well received British cozies set in Fethering, a small English town out of Miss Marple by way of The Last of the Summer Wine.

   Blotto, Twinks and the Ex King’s Daughter is yet another venue for Mr. Brett, and one that shows a different side both to his humor and English village life. Indeed, his new series lies somewhere in that vague country inhabited by P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster, Dornford Yate’s Berry and Company, some of the more playful Agatha Christie’s, the early Albert Campion, the more extravagant adventures of Michael Innes Sir John Appleby, and Leonard Wibberly’s Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

   The time is somewhere between the two world wars in an England of stately homes, dizzy aristocrats, loyal retainers, dastardly villains, and vintage automobiles.

   The setting is Tawcester Towers, where the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester (the Duke, her son — known as Loofah and Rupert the Dull, descendant of Rupert the Fiend and Black Rupert — having passed on five years earlier) is entertaining the exiled king of Mittleuropa, Sigismund, when her youngest son, the Right Honorable Devereaux Lyminster, known as Blotto (and with good reason) announces he’s found a body in the library, one Captain Schtoltz.

   In very short order Chief Inspector Trumbull and Sergeant Knatchbull arrive, none too impressed by the body or the Duchess and her royal guest, and then to add to the trouble the Princess Ethelinde is kidnapped.

   Well, naturally Blotto can’t allow that kind of thing to happen in Tawcester Towers without doing something, but considering his limited capacity in the brains department, it is just as well his beautiful sister Lady Honoria, known as Twinks, has a first rate mind and nose for murder (“– what a brainbox that girl had”).

   And the chase is on — in vintage open automobiles of course — and with Grimshaw, Blotto’s valet, in tow (a gentleman never travels without his valet) all the way to Mittleuropa, where they stumble on intrigue supplied by nearby Transcarpathia, ruled by King Anatol and Princess Ethlinde’s betrothed, Prince Fritz-Ludwig among others.

   Before you can say Zenda…, Blotto and Twinks (Grimshaw in tow) are on the trail of the murderer in the capital Zling and over the battlements of the Castle Berkenziepenkatzen … assuming you actually can say any of that.

   Of course Blotto will rescue the Princess and nobly renounce said princess in true Rassendyl style (he has to get out of it somehow) while Twinks will hunt down the kidnapper and murderer displaying both brains and spunk, but it is all a near run thing — especially for Blotto, who might have ended up king of Mittleuropa, or in the arms of the dangerously attractive Svetlana Lubachev (“as a femme fatale she did have some standards”). All before Blotto confronts the killer back in England at jolly old Tawcester Towers in Rupert the Antisocial’s billiard room.

   This is a very funny book, inventively, and splendidly, silly, bright, clever, and outrageous. There isn’t a serious bone in its head. I’m not really sure a mere reviewer can convey the exact spirit and voice of the book, but if you want to escape from reality into a world of smiles, chuckles, and undignified guffaws, this is your chance. Wodehousian, yes, but with a few left turns reminiscent of the Marx Brothers or Mel Brooks, and all bundled up as an attractive new series we can only hope to see more of.

   If you want a few laughs you’d be blotto not to read it.

       The Blotto & Twinks series —

1. Blotto, Twinks, and the Ex-King’s Daughter (2009)
2. Blotto, Twinks and the Dead Dowager Duchess (2009)

3. Blotto, Twinks and the Rodents of the Riviera (2011)

SIMON BRETT – Mrs. Pargeter’s Package. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1991. Warner, reprint paperback, 1992. UK edition: Macmillan, hardcover, 1990.

   Mrs. Pargeter, the widow of a master criminal with lots of friends, decides to accompany an old friend, Joyce Dover (is this name in homage to Joyce Porter, author of the Dover books?) herself a recent widow, on a package tour of Corfu in Greece.

   As they go through Customs, she asks Mrs. Pargeter to carry a package for her, and the next day Joyce’s body turns up, an apparent suicide. Mrs. Pargeter is, of course, suspicious. She slept a bit too soundly the night of her friend’s death, and their luggage seems to have been searched.

   Worse, the local police seem entirely too anxious to label the death Suicide and forget about it. But stranger still, the package Mrs. Pargeter was carrying for her friend turns out to be a bottle of Ouzo: So why was Joyce smuggling Greek Wine into Greece?

   Myself, I can’t fathom why Brett is becoming so enamoured of Mrs. Pargeter when Charles Paris is such a much more entertaining character. Mrs. P., despite her friends, is pretty much interchangeable with any number of LOLs, and this case is completely conventional and without a single memorable incident.

SIMON BRETT – A Comedian Dies. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1979. Reprint paperbacks include: Berkley, 1980; Dell, 1986; Warner, 1990. UK edition: Victor Gollancz, hardcover, 1979.

   Making good use of his background in radio and television, and of his interest in the theater, Simon Brett has created one of the most likable characters among recent series sleuths: Charles Paris, a middle-aged and not very successful radio actor whose vices include drink, women, and stumbling into murder cases that he is forced to solve.

   The Paris novels are distinguished by solid plotting, well-drawn entertainment business backgrounds, and a nice interweaving of humor that often borders on spoof.

   One of the first things the reader of A Comedian Dies, which has a modem British vaudeville background, will notice is that there is a gag at the beginning of each chapter. A gag such as:

   Having discovered this, most readers will no doubt be tempted to flip through the book and read all of the gags immediately, like gulping popcorn. You should refrain from doing this, however. Taken one at a time, every dozen pages or so, each will provoke an amused and tolerant groan; taken all at once, they are sort of like listening to a Bob Hope monologue and may therefore cause severe trauma, if not a sudden desire to take up golf or vote Republican.

   On the other hand, the novel itself is worth reading all at once. Paris and his estranged wife, Frances, trying once again to mend their marriage, are attending a vaudeville show at the Winter Gardens in Hunstanton, a small English seacoast town. But the show the star performer, comedian Bill Peaky, puts on is not at all what Paris anticipated: Peaky is electrocuted on stage while clutching his electric guitar and microphone.

   At the inquest, the coroner decides the death was accidental, due to faulty wiring, but Paris has his doubts and starts an investigation of his own. Suspects abound, owing to the fact that Peaky was not a very popular fellow. Paris is something of a bumbler, which only enhances his appeal; and he does get to the bottom of things eventually, in spite of the eighteen gags Brett throws at him along the way.

         ———
   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.