LEA WAIT – Shadows at the Fair. Pocket, paperback reprint; 1st printing, July 2003. Hardcover edition: Scribner, July 2002.

   Since Lea Wait herself is a long-time antique dealer, one specializing in prints, it comes as little surprise that Maggie Summer, her detective heroine in this, the first in a series, is one also. An antique dealer, that is, specializing in prints.

   And that’s the part of the story that’s the most fun to read, even though most of Maggie’s discussion of her stock in trade and other shop talk with her customers is quite irrelevant to the mystery — the death of another dealer who’d set up at same Rensselaer Antique Show as Maggie.

   In fact, both customers and dealers are beautifully portrayed in all of their foibles and eccentricities, of which (from my own personal experience) customers and dealers have many. To put it mildly. Also right on in terms of characterization is Ben, the mildly retarded nephew assisting one of Maggie’s friends, who’s also set up at the show.

   Which brings me to the part I didn’t care for so very much. Ben is accused of the murder — which allows the show to go on, with (as the police say) the killer caught. A fatal flaw for many a cozy: there’s far too much laughing and joking and kidding around when murder’s been done — with poor Ben sitting there alone in the lockup.

   I was also ready to add another source of dissatisfaction, that of predictability, but I have to tell you that while the first two-thirds of the murder investigation falls into that particular category, I did not see the ending coming. My socks are still on, but it opened my eyes a little wider.

   And so. With all of the pluses and minuses added in, subtracted off and weighed up against each other, the bottom line? An average sort of mystery, but with a nudge or two in the right direction, one that could have been improved upon immensely. There’s promise here, but apart from the antique dealer background, the rest is fairly uneven, at best.

     The Maggie Summers “Antique Print Mysteries” series —

Shadows At the Fair (2002)
Shadows On the Coast of Maine (2003)
Shadows On the Ivy (2004)

Shadows At the Spring Show (2005)

THEODORA GOES WILD. Columbia Pictures, 1936. Irene Dunne, Melvyn Douglas, Thomas Mitchell, Thurston Hall, Elisabeth Risdon, Margaret McWade, Spring Byington. Director: Richard Boleslawski.

   Humor is a funny thing. This is the lead-off movie in a boxed set of Screwball Comedies (Volume Two), and not only did I never laugh, but there are elements in this film that I actively disliked, which seldom happens. (I do screen the movies I choose to watch ahead of time.)

   Well, OK, maybe I did smile once or twice.

   The theme here is small-town holier-than-thou gossips and self-selected morality leaders – the small town being Lynnfield, somewhere in New England, where the local literary society is up in arms with the publisher of the local newspaper (Thomas Mitchell), who’s started to serialize the latest racy romance novel that’s sweeping the country.

   Little do the members of the local literary society know that the author, Caroline Adams, is one of their own: Theodora Lynn, who lives with her two aunts in Lynnfield (and yes, the town is named after their family), and who teaches Sunday school classes and plays the organ at church.

   In constant fear of her secret identity being revealed, Theodora (who of course is played by Irene Dunne) goes to New York to meet her publisher (Thurston Hall) to make him keep his promise to stay absolutely mum.

   The comedy potential is there, all right, as I’m sure you can see, but the man she meets, the artist who designed the risqué cover of her book, Michael Grant (Melvyn Douglas), is such an ill-mannered oaf, an utter boor if not an outright cad, it is impossible to understand what she sees in him.

   Of course she reacts to his constant taunts by going on an all-out nightclub drinking spree with him, even to the extent of ending up in his apartment to wrap up the evening. (Nothing much happens, but I imagine in 1936, the entire audience was holding their breath.)

   Fleeing back to Lynnville the next morning, Theodora is tracked down by her not-so-secret admirer, who manages to make himself even more dislikable, if that’s possible, but of course in the movies, anything’s possible, isn’t it?

   When the tables turn on Michael Grant, though, and do they ever, that’s when the training wheels come off, and Theodore lives up to the title of the movie – does she go wild? yes! – and it’s Michael Grant who faces …

   I won’t tell you what he faces, but it was nice to see him in the predicament he finds himself in. Nice, but not particularly funny.

   If you were to ask me, which I guess you are, since you’ve read this far, I liked Irene Dunne’s character a lot more when she was playing the innocent Theodora (although a Theodorea with a secret) a lot more than I did the wild Theodora, with a vast array of designer dresses and hairdos that do not especially flatter her.

   Rather than wild, she looked to me more like a small child playing dress-up, but what had to pass for wild on the screen in the mid-1930s was a lot more innocent than what you can see on your TV screen today.

   Irene Dunne was nominated for an Oscar in the role, and from all accounts, I’m in the minority in my opinion of this movie, and I thought you should know that too.

JOANNA DRAYTON – Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. HarperCollins, Australia, hardcover, January 2008; softcover, 2009.

   The first biography of Ngaio Marsh following Margaret Lewis’s Ngaio Marsh: A Life (1991, reprinted by Poison Pen Press, 1998), is this book by Joanna Drayton. Published by HarperCollins of New Zealand, it is evidently unavailable for direct purchase in the United States, providing, perhaps, further evidence that big publishers are losing interest in marketing Golden Age British authors in the their greatest potential market (Christie and Sayers excepted).

   In Britain, Harper recently has reprinted Marsh’s ouevre in three-volume, 800-plus page ominbuses; yet in the U.S. no new edition has been seen, I believe, since the late 1990s, about a dozen years ago. This is a shame, because I notice from Amazon.com reviews that Marsh seems to be more positively received in the U.S. than in Britain; and in New Zealand, Marsh’s home turf, she has been, according to Joanne Drayton, largely forgotten as a writer. (Rather amazingly, considering that she must be, one would think, the country’s best-selling native author.)

   Perhaps this explains why it has been hard to find reviews for Drayton’s book, which was published two years ago. When one compares the publicity in Britain given to the 2008 biography of Agatha Christie (the first substantive new one in nearly twenty-five years), Laura Thompson’s Agatha Christie: An English Mystery, with the paucity of that afforded Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime, the contrast is striking. It’s too bad, because Ngaio Marsh unquestionably is one of the most significant writers of classical mysteries associated with Britain’s Golden Age of detective fiction.

   Yet, while I would have liked for Drayton’s book (and resultingly Ngaio Marsh) to have received more attention than it did, I have mixed feelings about how much it has added to the prior work on Marsh by Margaret Lewis.

   First, a comment on physical aspects of the two books. HarperCollins designed an excellent, striking jacket, attractive endpapers and chapter headings and even provided a built-in book marker in the manner of Library of America, all of which is quite nice to see (though, as is often the case today, the paper is too thin and the print too light and indistinct, especially in contrast with the Poison Pen Press edition of Lewis’s book).

   However, I was rather amazed to see that the Drayton book, though it has notes and a select bibliography, is lacking an index! I find that quite irritating.

   Going on — finally — to the subject matter, I find the Drayton book superior to the Lewis in some ways, inferior in others. On the negative side, Drayton’s book seemed less informative on Ngaio’s youth and her parents, especially her father, than Lewis’s. I felt I learned more about Marsh’s home influences and family background from Lewis.

   Drayton gives much more information about Marsh’s life in the theater, but then Lewis writes a great deal about this as well. (I admit these sections of both books I skimmed over.)

   On the other hand, Drayton’s discussions of Marsh’s detective novels are superior to those by Lewis. This was an area I felt Lewis rather skimped, given the importance of this work. (Let’s be honest: would two biographies of Ngaio Marsh have been published had Marsh not been a very successful mystery author.)

   Nonetheless I was not fully satisfied with Drayton’s discussion of the books. She never really integrates themes throughout Marsh’s work, so the whole thing comes off as interesting in spots, but piecemeal (the discussions of the later books from the last fifteen years of Marsh’s life are less thorough as well — or are the books just less interesting?). Drayton provides a better Golden Age context for Marsh’s writing, yet it’s really just the four “Crime Queens” yet again.

   The sole focus on the Crime Queens is somewhat ahistorical in my view. For most of the Golden Age, there were two reigning Crime Queens: Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

   Allingham didn’t really fully emerge in her resplendent royal robes until the trio of Flowers for the Judge (1936), Dancers in Mourning (1937) and The Fashion in Shrouds (1938), I would say.

   And Marsh was not well recognized until after her trio of Artists in Crime (1938), Death in a White Tie (1938) and Overture to Death (1939).

   Even then, Marsh was only picked up by a big U.S. publisher, Little, Brown and Company (publishers of J. J. Connington), after Overture to Death was published; and it was Little, Brown who secured Marsh’s crown safely on her head with Surfeit of Lampreys (1940/41), still today generally considered her best book.

   So while Allingham and Marsh were Crime Queens, their reigns commenced during the waning of the Golden Age. (Arguably, they had something to do with that waning, at least if by “Golden Age” we mean a period when the puzzle was considered the keystone of the detective novel — it’s clear many readers read Marsh and Allingham more as novels of manners than as pure detective novels.)

   We also get the usual W. H. Auden stuff about how “normality was always restored” in Golden Age detective novels, etc. Well, that’s not true, but, hey, hopefully I’ll get my whack at this in print with the “Humdrum” books and the follow-up, more general survey I’m working on now.

   Despite my carping, I’ll emphasize again that the discussion of Marsh’s detective fiction is more interesting in Drayton than in Lewis (though make sure you read Doug Greene’s introduction to Alleyn and Others: The Collected Short Works of Ngaio Marsh as well!).

   Sometimes Drayton is a little ingenuous. She makes much of the “Marsh Million Murders” (this is a chapter title in her book), when, in 1950, I believe it was, Penguin reprinted ten Marsh titles in 100,000 printing runs. (Lewis noted this as well, but did not make such a fuss about it.)

   Drayton references Howard Haycraft in Murder for Pleasure from nearly a decade earlier about how the average detective novel sold only 1500-2000 copies (because most were read through libraries, not purchased).

   But Drayton is comparing apples and oranges to some extent here. Clearly, the Marsh Penguin deal is impressive, but Drayton needed to look at post-war paperback sales of other authors for a really accurate comparison. This was the time of the great paperback revolution and other authors, like, say, Spillane, Chandler and Stout were blowing them out in paperback too, surely.

   I smiled a bit when Drayton wrote that Marsh’s output of ten novels in seven years was “extraordinary.” Well, it’s certainly not slacking, but it’s not extraordinary by genre standards of the time, as a look at the output of, say, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts or John Street makes clear.

   I was reminded of an old SCTV skit where Olivia Newton John gets booked on a talk show with some porn stars and when they find out she’s made nine films or what have you in her whole career, they scoff, telling her they make nine films in a month!

   To be fair, however, Lewis had some odd moments too, like when she writes that The Nursing Home Murder is Marsh’s most popular book — can this really be right? there is no citation of this claim — and when she states that that in the U.S. after WW2 Marsh was “much preferred” to Agatha Christie, because people there no longer wanted to read about Hercule Poirot.

   However, Drayton’s book is a biography, not a literary study, so presumably some people will be most interested in this book for what it tells us about Marsh’s personal life. The big story here is Drayton speculates about Marsh, having been a lesbian, something the previous biographer eschewed doing.

   Marsh “was fiercely protective of her private life,” the jacket flap tells us, “No one knows better how to cover tracks and remove incriminating evidence than a crime fiction writer.” I find the “A-ha! we caught her out!” tone of this comment rather distasteful. To incriminate means to accuse someone of a wrongful act — surely HarperCollins did not mean to take the position that lesbianism is “wrongful.”

   Be that as it may, Drayton writes more in depth about a life-long female friend of Marsh’s, Sylvia Fox, than did Lewis, who only mentioned Fox sporadically. Drayton says she left the matter of whether Fox and Marsh had a lesbian relationship for readers to decide, though I think it’s pretty clear from her book that she implies that they did.

   The two women apparently took several trips together. Fox in 1963, when both women were in their late sixties, moved to a cottage that neighbored Marsh’s and a path was cut though a hedge so that they could conveniently visit each other.

   When Marsh was nearing death she destroyed a lot of papers (that “incriminating” evidence?). When Fox died a decade after Marsh, her headstone was placed beside Marsh’s. “They were the closest of friends, companions and neighbours in life and will be for eternity,” Drayton concludes. (This is even the concluding line of the book.)

   I had always wondered myself whether Marsh might have been a lesbian. I suppose Drayton’s book moves the ball somewhat in that direction; yet Marsh “always” denied she was a lesbian, according to Drayton and it’s certainly possible that the two women may merely have been close friends. Who knows?

   The larger problem with Drayton’s book as a biography is that it never really gets us any closer to the personality of the woman than Lewis’s. (Indeed, Lewis may have been a bit better here.) Marsh was a very guarded person and thus a tough nut to crack in a biography.

   Lesbianism does not seem to have been a theme of Marsh’s books, even implicitly. (There is a lesbian character in Singing in the Shrouds, whom, oddly, Drayton does not discuss.)

   Gay men appear in her books, invariably, as I recall, as stereotypical “queen” types — amusing up to a point, but hardly different from conventional portrayals. In contrast with Mary Fitt, who definitely was a lesbian, and Gladys Mitchell, who has been said to have been one, I do not really get that “feel” from Marsh’s books.

   Thus, while the matter of Marsh’s sexuality probably at this late date will never be resolved, I’m not sure how relevant it is to her analyses of her work anyway.

   So, should you buy this book? If you have the Lewis already, I’d say it’s a judgment call. On the whole, I would say Drayton’s is the more interesting work, but the Lewis has some points in its favor as well. Meanwhile, there’s still room for a really definitive critical study of the woman’s book on crime, which to me are even more interesting than her “life in crime.”

THE NIGHT HORSEMEN. Fox Film Corporation, 1921. Tom Mix, Mae Hopkins, Joseph Bennett, Sid Jordan, Bert Sprotte, Cap Anderson. Based on the novel The Night Horseman, by Max Brand (Putnam, 1920). Director: Lynn Reynolds. Shown at Cinecon 27, Hollywood CA, September 1993.

   Tom Mix plays Whistlin’ Dan Barry in this filming of a Max Brand novel, a somewhat bizarre tale of a cowpoke who follows the flight of the geese and whose eyes turn yellow when he’s angry.

   His code would keep him away from the dying rancher who raised him and drive him to kill the rancher’s son whom he seems to love like a brother. Dan crosses the meanest man in the county by killing his brother, and their battle, along with Dan’s reconciliation with the rancher’s son and the gal who loves him, made for an exciting, satisfying wind-up.

SUSANNE ALLEYN – A Treasury of Regrets. St.Martin’s Press, hardcover, April 2007.

Genre:   Historical mystery. Leading character:  Aristide Ravel; 4th in series; 2nd published (see below). Setting:   France, 1797.

First Sentence:  Since the twenty-fourth of Frimaire, Aristide Ravel had dreamed at least a dozen times of the guillotine.

   It begins with the poisoning death of Martin Dupont, the controlling head of a large household. A servant girl, Jeannette Moineau, is arrested. A member of the house, Laurence, asks the police for help as she does not believe the girl is guilty.

   Police investigator Aristide Ravel agrees to work with her, also discovering there is another link between them from the past. As others die, Ravel continues to search for motive believing if he finds the motive, he’ll find the killer.

   Ms. Alleyn does know how to bring post-Revolution Paris alive. Best of all, we come to know the period from the characters; their memories, the awkwardness in speech tying to confirm to the new forms of address, the new calendar and the challenges living day-to-day. It is enough past the Revolution that there is not the high level of fear, but recent enough that you sense people’s uncertainty.

   Aristide is a complex and interesting character, but although his back story was provided, he never really came to life. In spite of the personal connection between him and Laurence, I sensed no chemistry or emotional connection. Even at the end, rather than being left with a sense of curiosity, I found I didn’t particularly need to know what happens. For the other characters, perhaps because there were so many of them, none of them were well developed.

   The story has a very powerful opening. Fascinating information is provided on the different figures involved in the Revolution, and the impact on the monetary structure. The plot, however, was very slow until about half-way through. As we progressed, I felt there was a rather too convenient twist and huge leaps in logic made to bring us to the proper conclusions.

   In spite of the positive elements, and there were some, I did not find this book as engrossing as the previous books in the series. Had this been the first book I’d read of this series, I might not read another.

   Fortunately, I have read the other two books published so far, and I loved them. I have great hopes that the next book will restore my faith in this author.

Rating:   Okay.

       The Aristide Ravel series:

1. Game of Patience (2006)    [Book Three; 1796]

2. A Treasury of Regrets (2007)    [Book Four; 1797]
3. The Cavalier of the Apocalypse (2009)    [Book One; 1786]
4. Palace of Justice (2010)    [Book Two; 1793]

MICHAEL ATKINSON – Hemingway Cutthroat. St. Martin’s, hardcover, July 2010.

   Ernest Hemingway, fresh to Spanish shores to write about and participate in the Spanish Civil War is …

   A good start for Michael Atkinson’s second darkly humorous mystery (following Hemingway Deadlights, 2009) to feature a somewhat bemused Papa Hemingway as reluctant sleuth.

   Though Hemingway (and especially that famous lost suitcase and missing novel of his) has featured in mystery and suspense novels before (notably by Bill Granger and Dan Simmons), Atkinson has taken a unique turn eschewing any attempt to recreate the Hemingway style or voice while managing to suggest it whenever he puts us in Hemingway’s mind, and taking a decidedly cock-eyed look at the author’s famous machismo without parodying or laughing at it.

   After being skinned in a game of Mus and participating in a bullfight in a Madrid basement Hemingway finds himself trying to uncover who murdered Pazos, a bureaucrat in the Popular Front and an old pal of Papa’s from the First World War, and accompanied by his friend and literary rival John Dos Passos.   [FOOTNOTE]

   Murder novels set in wartime settings can be tricky things, and amid the Spanish Civil War — a rehearsal for the Second World War with the Nazis on the Royalist side and Stalin and much of the West on the Republican side — the fate of one man amid so much slaughter is a tough sell, but Atkinson manages to bring it off both thanks to his cranky sense of humor and a convincing, if offbeat, portrait of Hemingway as a boozing, brawling, but loyal friend who won’t let go short of uncovering the killers and the motive behind the death of Pazos.

   And there are plenty of suspects on both sides. Spain in the Civil War was a treacherous place. Aside from the war the Republican side was haunted by Soviet purges designed to cover up their general incompetence against the Nazi blitzkrieg, and the hot blooded and violent nature of the people themselves.

   Atkinson uses this as the basis of a good deal of grim humor and populates the novel with a collection of colorful types who complicate Hemingway’s investigation, including Dr. Florapedes Crespo, his friend Pazos mistress:

   Hemingway may seem an unlikely sleuth, but he was a fan of both Dashiell Hammett (he wrote To Have and To Have Not largely as his ‘answer’ to what he perceived as the false idea that the tough guy was uniquely suited to survival that he thought was Hammett’s theme), and Raymond Chandler, and a champion of Georges Simenon and Maigret from his years in Paris where Gertrude Stein introduced him to the joys of the Maigret novels.

   He may not be a particularly cerebral sleuth, but as a two-fisted investigator with trench coat and booze in hand he is well suited to the rough and tumble investigation style of Atkinson’s humorous and suspenseful novels, and his years as a crime reporter in Kansas City add a certain reality to the conceit of Hemingway as detective.

   Hemingway soon puts the pieces together and finds himself both hunter and hunted as he puts together the story of Pazos death at risk to life limb and the few illusions he has left until an effecting, ironic, and surprisingly powerful conclusion:

   It is one of the few times Atkinson apes the Hemingway voice to any extent, and he gets it right and at the right time, and in the right place, and for the right reason.

   I’ll look for Atkinson’s first novel and keep an eye out for later books that may emerge, whether they feature Papa Hemingway as sleuth or not. Atkinson has a good ear for dark humor and even a touch of slapstick, and in this relatively short and suspenseful book has produced a good evocation not only of Hemingway, but of the dark and terrible price of a modern yet ancient land in wartime.

[FOOTNOTE]   The novel makes a good deal of the debate between Hemingway and Dos Passos on the subject of experience versus imagination in a work of fiction, and while it is true Hemingway set out to experience the things he would write about, he also wrote in the Nick Adams story, “On Writing” (also quoted above):

JAMES ROSS – They Don’t Dance Much. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1940. Paperback reprint: Signet #913, abridged edition, April 1952. Hardcover reprint: Southern Illinois University Press, “Lost American Fiction” series, 1975; reprinted in ppbk by Popular Library, 1976 (scarce).

   Okay, a few weeks ago I was all set to read some Henry James when someone here mentioned Richard Hallas’ You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, and I decided I should have another look at it. Only on the way to dig out Play, I stumbled across something else I hadn’t read in 30-odd years and took up that instead.

   James Ross’s They Don’t Dance Much (1940) is about murder in a small southern town, which got to be a pretty over-worked sub-genre, but this one stands out.

   Ross creates vivid characters with a strong narrative voice, and slowly (but not too slowly) eases them into a plot about murder and double-cross, with some very brutal action and a few cunning twists.

   Over it all, there’s the stifling atmosphere of a town with nothing much there, and the casual brutality of boredom.

   There are also some memorable bad guys; Smut Milligan and Aston LeGrand are two of the most striking nasties in literature since Captain Hook and Ming the Merciless, and their presence looms over the book like a gathering thunderstorm.

   In fact, even the minor characters have that little something extra, and together with Ross’s terse-but-leisurely prose, it goes to make Dance something very memorable.

From the SIU edition:

    “Called by Raymond Chandler ‘a sleazy, corrupt but completely believable story of a North Carolina town,’ this tough, realis­tic novel exemplifies Depression literature in the United States.

    “Falling somewhere between the hard-as-nails writing of James M. Cain and the early stories of Ernest Hemingway, James Ross’s novel was for sheer brutality and frankness of language considerably ahead of his reading public’s taste for realism untinged with sentiment or profundity. In his brilliant Afterword to this new edition, George V. Higgins, author of the recent best-seller Cogan’s Trade, pays tribute to Ross for his courage in telling his story truthfully, in all its ugliness.”

   James Ross was born in North Carolina in 1911, was a newspaper man there and died in 1990. The book is his only novel.

WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS. MGM, 1928. Lon Chaney, Anita Page, Carroll Nye, Wheeler Oakman, Mae Busch, Polly Moran. Director: Jack Conway. Shown at Cinecon 27, Hollywood CA, September 1993.

   Even with a missing reel, this Lon Chaney film was a stunning thriller. Chaney plays a tough New York detective on the trail of “Mile Away” Skeeter (who’s always a mile away from the crime when it happens).

   Chaney’s hard as nails, but he’s got a soft spot for Myrtle (played by Anita Page, a Cinecon guest) and for a lad who’s got in with mob and just needs the right influence to go straight. But then the lad falls for Myrtle, who’s mighty taken with him and…

   Chaney’s rough-hewn face is a perfect mask for the hard-nosed cop, but bruised the way his heart will be. Nobody could ring the changes on pathos like Chaney, probably the greatest of silent screen dramatic actors. A smashing performance and superb photography and direction.

LUIZ ALFREDO GARCIA-ROZA – The Silence of the Rain. Picador, trade paperback reprint, July 2003. Hardcover edition: Henry Holt & Co., July 2002.

   This moody sort of detective novel was first published in Brazil and translated from the Portuguese, and to start matters off in the right direction right from the beginning, I highly recommend it to you.

   It begins in a mildly light-hearted fashion, as a mix-up over a wealthy executive’s suicide in a parking garage leads Inspector Espinosa of Rio de Janeiro’s First Precinct into handling the case as though it were a murder.

   (Not unlike Columbo of TV fame here in this country, we are privy to certain events that Espinosa is not, and even by the end of the case he is still running through endless speculations as to what actually happened.)

   The mood becomes gradually edgier, though, until page 121, which is where the reader is confronted with the realization, rather forcibly, that this is no cozy, and never was. Reading mysteries taking place in other countries also makes you realize that the rules are often totally different. Here’s a quote from page 161:

   And from page 238:

   Espinosa is, the dead man’s widow decides, a rare bird, a cultivated policeman. He is attracted to her. She is so wealthy she does not seem to notice. Espinosa is a reader of Dickens and Thomas De Quincey, is afflicted by loneliness and self-doubts, and he is also better than decent as a reader of character.

   Complicating matters is the million-dollar life insurance policy the dead man had recently taken out, followed by the disappearance of his secretary Rose.

   Besides an almost other-worldly atmosphere and surroundings, there are enough twists and turns of the ensuing plot to keep any detective story buff more than satisfied, even with the aforementioned Colombo-like prologue.

   There is also an ending I know I’ve never read before — I couldn’t possibly have forgotten a scene like this, and if you read the book, as I’m strongly suggesting, you won’t either.

   And yes, the telling of tale does switch back and forth between first person and third. Just in case you were wondering!

       The Inspector Espinosa series —

1. The Silence of the Rain (2002)
2. December Heat (2003)

3. Southwesterly Wind (2004)
4. A Window in Copacabana (2005)

5. Pursuit (2006)
6. Blackout (2008)
7. Alone in the Crowd (2009)

THE MISSING JUROR. Columbia Pictures, 1944. Jim Bannon, Janis Carter, George Macready, Jean Stevens, Joseph Crehan, with Trevor Bardette & Mike Mazurki (both uncredited). Director: Oscar Boetticher Jr.

   Two stars carry over from the movie which I previously reviewed here, Janis Carter and George Macready (in The Fighting Guardsman), and Jim Bannon was in the one I reviewed before that (in The Great Jesse James Raid). It’s like old home week here on the blog.

   Jim Bannon plays Joe Keats in The Missing Juror, an ace reporter who saved a man from going to the gallows for a crime he didn’t commit. Too late, though, for the previously condemned man (played most convincingly by George Macready) had gone mad while on Death Row, and he perishes instead in a mental institution – by his own hand, his body burned beyond recognition.

   Bad karma all round, you might say, but then things start to get interesting. The members of the jury who convicted the innocent man have begun to disappear or to die in a series of unfortunate accidents. Janis Carter plays Alice Hill, one of the jurors who has survived so far, and in the process of warning her – she doesn’t believe a word of it at first, naturally – Keats finds himself falling in love with her.

   It’s a great premise for a real noirish tale. It’s only too bad that no one involved in the production of this movie knew how to produce a real noirish tale, nor even how to tell a tale that makes any more sense than this one does.

   There are enough holes in the story to sink a battleship, and no one in the cast ever stops to make the obvious questions – with the answers equally obvious – if there are any. Some questions simply don’t have any answers, or at least none that I can think of.

   It may be as obvious to you, if you’ve read this far. I’ve tried to careful in how I described the basic structure of the plot, but with deficiencies as great as those that this movie has, I’d have to say nothing to avoid saying anything.

   But do you know what? It doesn’t really matter that the story has more leaks in it than a sieve that’s been used for target practice. This is a fun movie to watch, from beginning to end. And some (if not most) of that is due to the director, more familiarly known as Budd Boetticher. Unusual camera angles, imaginative lighting and clever dolly shots keep things interesting, and the story doesn’t stop moving once, even if it doesn’t make a lick of sense.