TRICK FOR TRICK. Fox, 1933. Ralph Morgan, Victor Jory, Sally Blane, Tom Dugan, Clifford Jones, Luis Alberni, Edward Van Sloan, Willard Robertson, Dorothy Appleby. Photography: L. William O’Connell; art director: Duncan Cramer; technical effects: Wm. Cameron Menzies. Director: Hamilton McFadden. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   Six months after the unsolved murder of a young woman who had been an assistant to magician Azrah (Morgan), Azrah arranges for a seance that will be attended by his former partner La Tour (Jory), as well by detectives and interested parties who may also be suspects.

   The seance is abruptly ended when la Tour is murdered and general confusion and much activity inside and outside Azrah’s stone fortress, a veritable castle of magic, ensues until everything is sorted out and the culprit is revealed.

   “Sorting out” is probably something of an exaggeration since the plot of this hokey Gothic melodrama is even more confusing than the plot of The Big Sleep

   I had seen this film many years ago, probably at Cinevent, and had remembered it as an entertaining mystery, with its most striking feature the magician’s castle, a cornucopia of special effects engineered by film wizard William Cameron Menzies.

   Those effects are still a treat, but the wildly improbable plot that brings in a sinister midget and his Chinese sidekick, a mad scientist wonderfully played by Luis Alberni in a style just the other side of manic, and the woeful relegation of Jory to what almost amounts to a cameo role, make this somewhat more animated than Sh! the Octopus but even more confusing.

   Having said all that, I must still admit that I enjoyed the film, although I’ll not be teasing people, as I have for some years, with the admonition that this is a film “you just can’t miss.”

WILL HARRISS – The Bay Psalm Book Murder. Walker & Co., hardcover, 1983. Paperback reprint: Pinnacle, 1985.

   Those are the thoughts that Professor Cliff Dunbar has as he begins investigating the details of Link Schofield’s murder. Schofield’s daughter asks Dunbar to examine the details of her father’s death after the police classify it as “open but unsolved.”

   Dunbar agrees to take a preliminary look, since Link was a close friend and because he faces a great deal of free time. Dunbar’s wife unexpectedly died of cancer several months earlier, and he has resigned his faculty position because of differences with the chairman and doubts about teaching in general.

   Perhaps the most curious aspect of Link’s murder is that the killers took $14.00 from his wallet, yet left the Bay Psalm Book in his hand — a rare book worth $300,000. Cliff’s investigation brings him into dangerous contact with forces that soon spell personal danger.

   The trail leads to Las Vegas, with its blackjack tables and corruption behind the scenes, and California politics with its ruthless campaign tactics. Along the way, Cliff enlists the services of a bright, pretty proofreader named Mona. She provides the professor with a little romantic uplift.

   Winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel of 1983, this book sparkles with style and panache. Harriss has created a delightful mystery that is extremely well-plotted, filled with enjoyable, full-bodied characters, and one that maintains a brisk pace that never falters.

   The first sentence glitters with quality and serves as the first clue that the reader is in store for an award-winning mystery treat!

    Bibliographic Data: [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

HARRISS, WILL(ard Irvin). 1922-

       The Bay Psalm Book Murder (n.) Walker 1983. [Cliff Dunbar]
       Timor Mortis (n.) Walker 1986. [Cliff Dunbar]

       Noble Rot (n.) St. Martin�s 1993.

  VIVIAN CONNELL – The Chinese Room. Dial Press, hardcover, 1942; The Citadel Press, hc, 1943 (shown). [See bibliographic note below.] Paperback reprint: Bantam 454, 1948 (with numerous later printings).

  THE CHINESE ROOM. Clasa Films Mundiales, 1968. Guillermo Murray, Elizabeth Campbell, Carlos Rivas, Regina Torné, Cathy Crosby. Based on the novel by Vivian Connell. Screenplay/director: Albert Zugsmith.

   Much like the Curt Siodmak book (Whomsoever I Shall Kiss, reviewed here ), The Chinese Room starts out with a great premise for a murder mystery: Nicholas Bude is a wealthy London Banker with a wife in the country and a mistress in the city whose sterile life is disrupted when a servant’s daughter commits suicide.

   It develops that the dead girl was in the habit of writing anonymous threatening letters to herself, and while discussing this with a doctor helping the police, Bude gets into a heated argument about loneliness and lonely minds.

   He makes a bet with the doctor that anyone with a normal mind (himself, for instance) could send himself threatening letters without being driven to suicide, and the doctor dares him to prove it, which he agrees to do, in front of witnesses.

   Then he starts getting anonymous threatening letters. Is he writing them himself, without knowing it, is someone trying to drive him to suicide or setting him up for murder?

   Like I say, it’s a great start for a classic mystery — just improbable enough to sound bizarre without stretching it too far, but Vivian Connell abandons it for long stretches to talk about sex.

   Now I’m not one to object to lots of sex in a book. Even gratuitous sex is sex, after all, and I don’t mind it a bit. In fact, when it was published in war-time England, The Chinese Room shocked and titillated a nation, say the publicists. And it still has the power to shock and titillate those who are easily shocked and titillated.

   Others might find the story of a husband and wife who are horny as hell but sexually incompatible a bit tame — I know I kept wishing Connell would get back to the Mystery of the letters. But as soon as Bude’s wife gets around to discovering them and deciding to unravel the mystery herself, all the clues fall into her lap in the first hour, and Connell gets right back to the sex.

      By the way, Chinese Room was filmed — ineptly, but with surprising fidelity — by Albert Zugsmith in 1968.

   It’s worth mentioning because in the world of Cinema, Zugsmith was a true wandering soul, producing classics like Touch of Evil, Written on the Wind and The Incredible Shrinking Man, along with alternative classics and pure schlock like High School Confidential, Confessions of an Opium Eater and Sex Kittens Go to College.

   Truly an artist in a class by himself, and a good thing, too. His film of Chinese Room has some interesting ideas, but it suffers from the usual Zugsmith stigmata of minimal budget, deplorable script and regrettable acting — problems Zugsmith sometimes rose above, but not here.

Bibliographic Note:   From the Amazon description of the Barricade (2005) reprint edition. “First published in America in 1942, Dial recalled the original edition soon after publication. The Society for the Suppression of Vice demanded the censorship due to the sexual nature of a particular phrase. Citadel Press offered an edition in 1943 minus the offending phrase, and a bestseller emerged, eventually selling more than three million copies in its various editions.”

   On abebooks.com, two copies of what are said to be the Dial edition are offered. The asking price for one is $4.69, including postage (but is described as a reprint). The other, described as a First Edition, will set you back $4998.00. Both are hardcovers without jackets. Any takers?

“Annabel.” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Season 1, Episode 7). First air date: 1 November 1962. Dean Stockwell, Susan Oliver, Kathleen Nolan, Bert Remsen. Teleplay: Robert Bloch, based on the novel This Sweet Sickness (1960) by Patricia Highsmith. Director: Paul Henreid.

   David Kelsey (Dean Stockwell), outwardly a fairly normal if brilliant individual, is leading a double life, assuming two different identities.

   He also has a case of unrequited love for Annabel Delaney (Susan Oliver), who is already married to a man who’s getting angrier and angrier; while David, in turn, hardly notices Linda Brennan (Kathleen Nolan), herself another case of unfulfilled desire. Ultimately, something’s got to give — and it does, violently ….

   Stockwell’s character is very much in Patricia Highsmith’s Talented Mr. Ripley mold: insensitive, narcissistic, warped, and capable of almost anything.

   Dean Stockwell’s huge list of screen credits includes Home, Sweet Homicide (1946), Song of the Thin Man (1947), Compulsion (1959), two episodes of Columbo, one Ellery Queen (1975), 97 episodes of Quantum Leap (1989-1993), and 15 appearances on the Battlestar Galactica reboot (2006-09).

   Susan Oliver did a lot of TV starting in the ’50s; sci-fi enthusiasts remember her from the Star Trek pilot film. She had a long run on the Peyton Place soaper, two appearances each on The Name of the Game and Murder, She Wrote — and she was also a superiior pilot.

   As for Robert Bloch: Psycho — ’nuff said.

Hulu:   http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi1071120409/

QUIET PLEASE: MURDER.   20th Century-Fox, 1942. George Sanders, Gail Patrick, Richard Denning, Lynne Roberts, Sidney Blackmer, Kurt Katch, Byron Foulger. Screenplay: John Larkin, based on the story “Death Walks in Marble Halls,” by Lawrence G. Blochman. Director: John Larkin.

   According to IMDB, the Blochman story that this 1940s crime and mystery film wass based on was one titled “Death From the Sanskrit,” but other than IMDB, neither David Vineyard nor I have found a reference to a Blochman tale anywhere else by that name.

   We may be wrong about this, but we’re sure (say 99.99%) that Quiet Please: Murder was adapted instead (and loosely so) from “Death Walks in Marble Halls,” a short novel that first appeared in The American Magazine, September 1942. It appeared later in EQMM as “Murder Walks in Marble Halls,” and was reprinted under its original title in 1951 as #19 in Dell’s short-lived series of slim-sized 10-Cent paperbacks.

   Says David, who may be the only person to have both watched the movie and read the book:

   Me again, Steve. I’ve watched only the movie, and what follows is the basic outline of the plot. As you’ll see, other than the basic library setting, there isn’t a lot in common, as David says. The forger in the film who isn’t in the book, as he mentions, is Jim Fleg (an oilier than usual George Sanders), who’s stolen a rare copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from a downtown library and who’s planning, with the able assistance of femme fatale Myra Blandy (Gail Patrick), to make multiple copies and sell them to equally unscrupulous collectors as a continuing source of income.

   Unfortunately Myra makes the mistake of selling one of the forged copies to a Nazi agent (Sidney Blackmer), who wants his money back. At which point enters PI Hal McByrne, a lanky womanizer played by Richard Denning, causing Myra (the femme fatale he falls for) to realize she can kill two birds (at least) with one stone.

   At which point the rest of movie moves to the aforementioned library, where several murders do occur, as the title of the film suggests (I confess I lost track of how many), along with many well-constructed chases of one character by another between the stacks of books, plus a very timely blackout monitored by a comically excitable librarian cum war raid warden played to perfection by Byron Foulger, a name long-time old movie fans will certainly remember.

   Either the movie was actually filmed in a library — and believe it or not the Dewey Decimal System, carefully explained earlier on, is part of the plot — or the producers of this film raided the shelves of several nearby furniture stores. (The library is said to have two miles’ worth of books, but naturally we do not get to see them all.)

   The plot is a complicated one. You have to pay attention every minute of the way. (My usual technique of watching the movie a second time did not help, and in fact I only found myself confused in other ways.) In terms of production values, they’re probably only par for the course in terms of black and white mystery movies made in 1942, but the film itself is surely an entertaining one.

PostScript:   Mike Grost reviews the novella, not the movie, on his Classic Mystery and Detection website. He says of it, in part, and I quote:

LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE – Terence O’Rourke, Gentleman Adventurer. A. Wessels Co., US, hardcover 1905. Reprinted as The Romance of Terence O’Rourke, Gentleman Adventurer: Bobbs-Merrill, US, hc, 1907; Grosset & Dunlap, no date (shown). Also: Grant Richards, UK, hc, 1906. Silent film: Universal, 1914. First appeared in The Popular Magazine, circa 1904-05. (See comments for additional information.)

   In 1904, ten years before he would pen the first adventure of Michael Lanyard, the Lone Wolf, Louis Joseph Vance was concerned with the adventures of another American in Paris, Colonel Terence O’Rourke, an American soldier of fortune, down on his luck and about to face a change of fortune.

   In short order he pawns a watch presented to him for bravery in a South American revolution, finds a casino, loses every penny, is challenged to a duel, pursued by a mob, and leaps into a carriage to escape — where he meets a beautiful woman, Beatrix, the Madame la Princess de Grandilieu, and by sheer luck — the kind of thing that was always happening to adventurers like ‘the O’Rourke’ — utters the secret password that leads her to believe he is the man she is supposed to meet.

   In the hands at a romancer like Vance, that’s all that is needed.

   O’Rourke learns her brother has plans to lead an army into the Sahara and make himself an emperor of the wastes… There is only one problem with his plan. The Emperor is a coward and a fool, known as ‘le petit Lemercier,’ the laughing stock of France for his foolish exploits.

   A grand scheme, one O’Rourke would likely by pass though if not for the beautiful Beatrix. He teams up with Daniel ‘Danny’ Mahone, once his batman, and takes command of the army of the Emperor of the Sahara. But no one asked the local nomadic bandits the Tawareks (Tuaregs).

   Beatrix is kidnapped, and O’Rourke rides madly in the desert after her and her Tawarek captor…

   … her husband Prince Felix dies, and O’Rourke rescues the lady and leads a desperate battle, and bloody retreat.

   But he doesn’t get the girl. After all, she is a princess and he is a penniless adventurer — besides, his adventures were just beginning. Two sets of them flowed from Vance’s capable pen.

   O’Rourke adventured in the pages of The Popular Magazine where he wielded his sword and Mauser with deadly skill. After “The Empire of Illusion,” the series of stories which make up the tale comprising the first half of the book, he finds himself in a Ruritainian adventure rescuing a kidnapped prince and dueling an evil prince. After that he is discovered preventing a revolt against the British in Egypt.

   Always his fist, his sword, and his gun are quick to be employed in a good cause; always he just fails to make enough to reclaim his true loves hand; always he finds a new adventure.

   Beatrix, bless her, would have him anyway, but O’Rourke will not impoverish her. He’ll have a fortune for her or die trying. And he frequently comes perilously close to doing just that. Not that he is averse to other beautiful women. He’s loyal, not dead.

   Eventually he inherits one of those convenient fortunes from one of those equally convenient relatives that die and leave such fortunes in tales of adventure and romance, battles a deadly Duke on a vertiginous stairway, and sends him to hell through a doorway that leads only to a precipitous plunge a la David Balfour’s near fate in Kidnapped. He wins his ladies hand and lives happily ever after.

   Rudolph Rassendyll couldn’t have said it better to Princess Flavia while freeing the prisoner in the castle of Zenda.

   Of course Vance couldn’t keep a good man down, and O’Rourke returned in a prequel detailing his adventures with Danny before his fateful meeting in Paris. This was 1905 and only the Scarlet Pimpernel managed to keep adventuring after marriage. At least Beatrix was spared all those kidnappings suffered by Bulldog Drummond’s wife.

   The pleasures of O’Rourke’s adventures are many. Vance was a novelist before he was a pulpster, and his characters are fully developed human beings with believable motives, actions, and consequences for their actions. O’Rourke may be a pulp superman, but he is a believable superman, and his feats of heroism are just within the bounds of probability, and he is never better than when the odds are impossible and the moment is desperate.

   Terence O’Rourke, Gentleman Adventurer can be downloaded for free or read on-line at Google Books in PDF or EUPB format. A more detailed account of his life and adventures can be found in Robert Sampson’s Yesterday’ Faces: Violent Lives, Vol. 6 (Bowling Green University Press).

   For us and O’Rourke that is enough. A sword, a gun, and the ‘high, bold heart of him.’ What more can an adventurer ask, even the armchair kind?

Editorial Comment:   For anyone wishing to read a contemporaneous review of this book, there is one online at The New York Times website. (A subscription may be required.)

   I have not yet confirmed them, but it seems likely that these are some of the stories that were combined to create the overall novel:

      In Which O’Rourke Serves the King (nv) The Popular Magazine Aug 1904
      In Which O’Rourke Saves a Throne (nv) The Popular Magazine Oct 1904
      In Which O’Rourke Pays a Debt (nv) The Popular Magazine Nov 1904
      In Which O’Rourke Sheathes His Sword (nv) The Popular Magazine Dec 1904

JAMES FRANCIS DWYER – The White Waterfall. Doubleday Page & Co., 1912; illustrated by Charles S.Chapman. W. R. Caldwell & Co., hc, International Adventure Library: Three Owls Edition. Serialized in The Cavalier in four parts, beginning 13 April 1912. Readily available in various Print on Demand editions and as an online etext.

   Australian writer Dwyer was a welcome regular in Blue Book Magazine in the 1930s, and this early South Seas adventure novel is a fine example of his robust, colorful narrative style.

   The remote, isolated island to which the characters travel, is thought to be uninhabited, but there are structures that pre-date the memory of any race that left written records, and a small group of natives perform ceremonies and make human sacrifices in the name of some savage God. This may remind some of a certain celebrated RKO film released in 1933, but the terrors are all too,human and no giant remnants of an earlier age live in the depths of the jungle.

   The protagonist, and narrator, Jack Verslun, an itinerant seaman, is hired to serve on a ship chartered by Professor Herndon, an obsessive scientist who has brought along his two attractive daughters on what turns out to be an ill-advised and dangerous voyage to “The Isle of Tears,” which a rough-looking rogue named Leith has promised the Professor will yield scientific wonders that will make his reputation.

   The party, aside from a largely native crew, is completed by Will Holman, a feisty young American who — the son of the owner of the chartered boat they are traveling on — is along for the heck of it and for the love of the younger of the two Herndon girls, Barbara. An older daughter, Edith, is useful for completing a quartet that I needn’t spell out for you.

   They reach the island after a terrific storm and when Jack is ordered to stay on the boat while Leith takes a small party to the island, concerned about Leith’s intentions, he jumps ship, catches up with the party and finds himself, Will, and the Professor and his daughters, in a situation that takes them to the brink of disaster.

   Dwyer is not, perhaps, as polished a stylist as John Russell, who wrote notable stories about adventures in the South Seas, but the slightly, pulpy cast of his story is perfectly pitched to drawn in a sympathetic reader, with the pace, once the horror of Leith’s intentions becomes clear, resembling the frantic drive of the flight through the jungle to the ship and escape of the earlier noted King Kong.

Editorial Comment: A brief biography of the author appears online at the Pulprack website, with another appearing here.

   And of special note to anyone reading this blog is The Spotted Panther, also by Dwyer, has recently been published in a handsome softcover edition by Black Dog Books. Highly recommended!

DOROTHY B. HUGHES – In A Lonely Place.   Duell Sloan and Pearce, hardcover, 1947. Paperback reprints include: Pocket #587, 1949; Bantam 1979, Carroll & Graf, 1984; Feminist Press, 2003.

Film: Columbia, 1950.   Humphrey Bogart (Dixon Steele), Gloria Grahame (Laurel Gray), Frank Lovejoy (Det. Sgt. Brub Nicolai).

   If you’ve seen the movie, which happens to be one of my favorites, know this: the book is completely different, but even better.

   Set in post-war L.A., the story is told in the third person, entirely from the point of view of Dix Steele. Dix is one of the lost men — someone who thrived in uniform, in danger, but who is now adrift, pretending to be a writer but living mostly on remittances from a wealthy uncle.

   When beautiful divorcee Laurel Gray comes into his life, he falls deeply in love and begins to heal, just a little. But Laurel begins to fear Dix, and she takes her concerns to Dix’s friend Brub Nicolai and his astute wife Sylvia. An old war chum of Dix’s, Brub is now an L.A. cop investigating a series of strangulation murders.

   As a crime story, this book starts out chillingly and compellingly, and becomes more so with each passing page.

   As a piece of social fiction, it paints a fascinating picture of post-war America, contrasting the disenchantment and isolation of some returning soldiers with the orderly, energetic, sociable world of recognizable “Greatest Generation” types like the Nicolai’s, who successfully fought a war and now want to build an orderly, peaceful world at home and also value having a good time — driving, dining, drinking and dancing.

   The prose is Hemingway-esque in its spareness. The integrity of the POV is scrupulous.

   This is one of the great American novels of the mid-20th century. If Hughes isn’t taught in colleges, she should be.

THE LAW OF THE 45’s. Normandy Pictures, 1935. Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams (Tucson ‘Two-Gun’ Smith), Molly O’Day, Al St. John (Stoney Martin), Ted Adams, Lafe McKee, Fred Burns. Screenplay: Robert Emmett Tansey, based on the novel by William Colt MacDonald (Law of the Forty-Fives, Covici Friede, 1933). Director: John P. McCarthy.

   To start off, to put off the inevitable and to put it bluntly, there is absolutely no reason anyone should watch this Bottom of the Barrel B-Western movie except for historical reasons.

   To wit: although not officially part of the canon, and even though only two of them show up, and one of them has the wrong name, this is the first of the “Three Mesquiteers” movies, of which there were 51 more to come, beginning in 1936 and ending in 1943.

   Although many players played the three cowboys over the years, the ones I remember most are Robert Livingston as Stony Brooke, Ray Corrigan as Tucson Smith, and Max Terhune as Lullaby Joslin. You may have your own favorite threesome, but as much as I liked Bob Steele as a cowboy star (Tucson Smith in the last 13 of them), the ones above were mine.

   Some movies with a running time of 57 minutes have so much crammed into them that each and every scene has a crucial part of the story line in it. Not so with Law of the .45’s. It is the longest 57 minutes I can remember sitting through since grad school. The acting is a mixture of old-fashioned silent movie stars trying to figure out what the microphone is doing there, with pauses for emphasis that you could plow an 18-wheeler through, while other of the players seem to have taken nicely to the new technology, speaking in normal tones and normal rhythms.

   Story: a crooked lawyer is apparently behind the gang of outlaws terrorizing the valley where Tucson and Stoney are bringing their herd of cattle, and the latter agree to work for Joan Hayden (Molly O’Day) and her father (Lafe McKee) to bring peace and justice back to the land again.

   Other than that, there is little but cowboys riding here and there in the hills, ranches being burned to the ground and cattle stampeding (as cattle are wont to do) — all very exciting, or it would be if you care for watching cowboys riding here and there in the hills, sometimes at very high speeds. There is also a group of singing wranglers, unnamed as a group or individually in the movie’s credits, but their identities can be found on the know-all IMDB page for the film.

   As for Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams, he gets to grimace and squint a lot, but on the other hand, he also gets the girl.

THE DIAMOND WIZARD. United Artists, US/UK, 1954. Released as The Diamond in the UK. Dennis O’Keefe, Philip Friend, Margaret Sheridan, Alan Wheatley, Francis De Wolff, Paul Hartmuth. Screenplay: John C. Higgins. Story Dennis O’Keefe, based on the novel Rich Is the Treasure (1952) by Maurice Procter. Directed by Dennis O’Keefe & Montgomery Tully.

   When a US Treasury agent is killed by British smugglers who have stolen a million dollars, a perfect diamond is found in his mouth. Perfect except for one thing — it’s artificial; and perfect artificial diamonds are a threat to both the British and American economies.

   So Treasury Man Joe Dennison (Dennis O’Keefe) is dispatched to England to team up with Special Branch’s Inspector Hector ‘Mac’ McClaren (Philip Friend) to track down the smuggler (Francis De Wolff) who is using a million dollars in stolen money to buy the artificial diamonds.

   The case gets more complex when lovely Marline Miller (Margaret Sheridan) shows up. She’s the niece of nuclear physicist Dr. Miller (Paul Hartmuth) who has gone missing — and once a romantic connection for Dennison.

   Following a handful of clues the police begin to tie the two cases together ending in an explosive climax somewhere between Edgar Wallace and Ian Fleming as they uncover something more sinister than flooding the diamond market afoot.

   This little film, directed by O’Keefe during a brief period when he fled to England like many other American actors of the period, is nothing new or great, but entertaining and loosely based on a novel by British mystery writer Maurice Procter, itself expanded from a novella “The Million Pound Note.” (Proctor is best known for his series of Inspector Harry Martineau police procedural novels.) The thrills are of the standard variety, but well enough done.

   There’s the usual master criminal, the usual mad scientists, some nasty thugs, and two tough honest cops. The difference between the American and British police style is played as complimentary rather than conflicting, and the scenes of the artificial diamonds being created have the nice SF touch of the kind that used to dominate German Expressionist cinema.

   This is an entertaining little film, not much more than a programmer, but coming in at 83 minutes it moves nicely and never really slows down for a breather. O’Keefe probably got the inspiration for this from his American film Walk a Crooked Mile (1948; Gordon Douglas, dir.) teaming him with Louis Hayward, with the latter the Scotland Yard man out of place in the US.