HENRY WADE – The Hanging Captain. Perennial Library, reprint paperback; 1st printing, 1981. First published in the UK: Constable, hardcover, 1932. First US edition: Harcourt Brace, hc, 1933 (shown).

    Henry Wade is as unlikely an author as you could expect to find in your local paperback bookstore, and thanks should go to whoever at Perennial is responsible for seeing to it that he is. Who knows, maybe even John Rhode will be next!

    What Wade does best, at least in this particular example of his work, is to demonstrate that there is no reason why a good, solid detective story must also be dull. There is a lot of importance placed upon alibis and time-tables in this case, and with some splendid cooperation between Scotland Yard and the local police the murderer of Sir Herbert Sterron is inevitably brought to justice.

    WARNING: In what follows, certain aspects of the mystery will be discussed that may reveal information that you, the would-be reader, might wish not to know in advance.

    I am curious that the dead man’s mysterious affliction was never mentioned. In A Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor tell us it was syphilis, but it might be noted that it was the English edition that they read.

    This one fact explains a good deal. For example, it gives us the reason for the Sterron’s mysterious withdrawal from society some years before. And, what is more, it also adds a strong tinge of irony to the killer’s motive — the overriding reason he did what he did.

    Either I missed something, or I suspect that some alteration was done to the American version, which I assume this edition follows. If the latter, what’s lost is a fine opportunity to make the final, crushing blow the book would (and should) have had.

Editorial Comment:   Not only did Perennial publish this book by Wade, but they did at least the following as well: A Dying Fall (1955), The Litmore Snatch (1957), Mist on the Saltings (1933*) and New Graves at Great Norne (1947*). The dates given are for the first UK edition; those so indicated with an asterisk were first published in the US by Perennial.

   The reference to John Rhode was, I presume at this much later date, meant to be an inside joke. Perennial did indeed publish at least two books by Rhode in paperback: The Claverton Affair (1933) and Death in Harley Street (1946).

THE CROOKED WEB. Columbia Pictures, 1955. Frank Lovejoy, Mari Blanchard, Richard Denning. Screenwriter: Lou Breslow. Director: Nathan Juran.

   If you take my advice, and I hope you do, don’t read any reviews of this movie anywhere you might see one. (Except this one of course.) Every last one of them that I’ve read gives the whole story away, or at least the part of it that counts. I’ll tell you more in a minute, but not – I guarantee you – anything you should not know ahead of time.

   Frank Lovejoy, the nominal star of this movie, has one of the most male distinctive voices I know, except for perhaps someone like Andy Devine, whom I’d have to concede can be recognized on an airport runway with 15 jet planes taking off or landing all at the same time.

   No, I mean in an everyday sense, a fellow with a voice of an everyday guy, talking in everyday tones – and I can still tell it’s Frank Lovejoy, no matter what movie, or more importantly, what radio show he may be in, and he was in quite a few.

   He plays the owner of a curbside hamburger joint in The Crooked Web, and Mari Blanchard is the carhop he’s engaged to. It’s established early on that Stan (he’s the man) is willing to take a gamble or two, so when Joanie’s brother (Richard Denning) comes through town with a secret deal in the works, he (Stan) is more than willing to cut himself in.

   Of course, as is always the case in low budget crime films like this one, things do not go exactly as Stan has planned, and here is where my warning comes in, and let me repeat: Do not read another review of this film. You might not even want to read the writing on the poster.

   Most reviewers of this film do not rate it very highly, and I agree. The last two-thirds of the movie is (are?) fairly ordinary indeed. Things do not go smoothly, though, and even though this is not a noir film, it has all of the trappings of one, so it is, as always, enjoyable seeing the protagonists work their way of their mishaps and other assorted screw-ups.

   Any leading roles that co-star Mari Blanchard ever had were, I believe, only in low-budget movies like this one, but she’s certainly easy enough on the eyes, speaking on behalf of the male half of the population. I found two posters for the movies, so you can see for yourself, although I’m not convinced that either pose she’s in is actually in the movie.

BARBARA LEONARD REYNOLDS – Alias for Death. Coward-McCann, hardcover, 1950.

   On her way by bus from Chicago to Dayton, Ohio, in 1945, Abigail Potter, prolific mystery writer under her own name and various pseudonyms, hears the plot for a perfect murder as planned by an Army corporal.

   By quick thinking, she discovers his real name and destination — Glen Falls, Ohio — and subscribes to the local paper awaiting news of an unexpected sudden death. Three years go by before one is reported, and then it is not the death of the person she believed was to be the corporal’s target.

   Knowing how the crime was committed and by whom, but not having any idea of why the victim was not whom she expected, Potter decides to go to Glen Falls, discover more about the crime, and unmask the murderer. However, all — indeed, very little — is not what she supposed, and she herself may have been the target of a poisoner.

   While not a first-class novel of a little-old-lady detective and not quite living up to its fine beginning, this is nonetheless good reading. Moreover, the author presented a situation that I considered nonsensical, explained it feebly, and thus caused me to overlook the essential pointer to the murderer. Excellent misdirection I thought, though it probably won’t fool anyone else.

   This was Reynolds’ only mystery. Why didn’t she write more?

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   As Bill says, this is the author’s only mystery. It’s a scarce book in nice condition; only good and/or ex-library copies can be more easily found — which I’ve done.

   There’s no information about Barbara Leonard Reynolds on the jacket, only the photo which you see to the left. Says Al Hubin of her in the Revised Crime Fiction IV: Born in Milwaukee (1915); lived in Ohio and then Hawaii. Year of death: 1990.

KEITH WOODCOTT – The Ladder in the Sky. Ace Double F-141, paperback original; 1st printing, 1962. [Paired with this novel, tête-bêche, is The Darkness Before Tomorrow, by Robert Moore Williams.]

   There was a time when every SF fan worthy of the title had to have a complete set of Astounding’s, and if not, then a set of Ace SF Doubles was almost as good a credential for getting yourself in the door.

   For the most part they were a direct carry over from the days of the pulp magazines, but gradually better authors and better writing came along – authors such as Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. LeGuin – but even so, their early stories still showed their pulp roots.

   And so does The Ladder in the Sky. Woodcott was one of the pen names of the much better known John Brunner, an author who went on to win a Hugo award or two – but not in 1962, nor for this book, as enjoyable as I found it to be.

   The Ladder in the Sky one of those books that heads off in one direction, a totally familiar one for veteran SF-nal readers, but somewhere along the way, it jumps off the track and all but starts over. (I love it when that happens. Or at least I usually do.)

   Picked seemingly at random from literally a slum on the wrong side of tracks on a backwater planet, Kazan is kidnapped and forced by a sorcerer into a mystical if not magical sort of servitude to a black demon or devil for the standard year and a day. (See the cover as shown above.)

   The purpose? To gain the powers he needs to rescue the city’s true leader from his imprisonment in an impregnable fortress surrounded by a moat filled with strange and ferocious creatures.

   Easily done. And then? The rest of the tale. (See above.) Kazan has to learn what his powers are, what they can be used for – and what they can’t – and most importantly, how to get along with his fellow humans while he’s struggling with his own identity.

   These, I am sure, are concepts that resonated strongly with the SF readers of the day. The writing is acceptable, but unfortunately some of the characters are only caricatures of real people. Primitive, in fact. It may have been lack of space – the novel is only 137 pages long – or (more likely) this early in Brunner’s career he had the ideas but not yet the skills to carry them out.

JEREMIAH HEALY – Yesterday’s News. Harper, hardcover, July 1989. Reprint paperback: Pocket; 1st printing, September 1990.

   A lot of people think highly of Boston-based PI John Francis Cuddy, and I wish I were one of them. I find both him and his cases rather bland, although I’m always hopeful whenever I decide to try another of them.

   This one falls into the same category, unfortunately, and it’s difficult to say exactly why. He’s hired by a female newspaper reporter to help her uncover a leak that led to the death of one of her sources — she’s working on a story involving corruption in the small seaport town of Nasharbor.

   She’s dead before he can get there. Suicide, the local police say. Cuddy knows better.

   Thus, a good beginning, a good picturesque locale, and the story seems only to inch on from there. Cuddy goes through the usual motions, gets a break on page 219, follows it up, and solves the case. And once he makes a deal — which he doesn’t call a deal– the whole affair is over, to everybody’s satisfaction, but mine.

   And there in a nutshell, I think maybe I answered my own question.

[UPDATE.] 01-19-10.   I wish I could tell you that I read another one in the series and really enjoyed it, but I can’t. It’s my fault, though, since (as far as I can recall) I haven’t read another in the series, and I ought to.

       The John Francis Cuddy Series:

1. Blunt Darts (1984)

2. The Staked Goat (1986)
3. So Like Sleep (1987)
4. Swan Dive (1988)
5. Yesterday’s News (1989)
6. Right To Die (1991)
7. Shallow Graves (1992)
8. Foursome (1993)

9. Act Of God (1994)
10. Rescue (1995)

11. Invasion Of Privacy (1996)
12. The Only Good Lawyer (1998)
13. Spiral (1999)
14. The Concise Cuddy [Collection] (1998)
15. Cuddy Plus One [Collection] (2003)

LOVE DETECTIVES. Columbia, 1934. Frank Albertson, Armand Kaliz, Betty Grable, Gloria Warner, Tom Dugan, Heinie Conklin and Blanche Payson. A “Musical Novelty” directed by Archie Gottler. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

    Lest you think I’ve returned to my Southern Baptist roots in my enthusiasm for the spiritual virtues of The Miracle Man [reviewed here not so very long ago], I recommend to you (on the happy chance that it turns up on a cable channel in your vicinity), a sprightly musical short with no redeeming quality other than its obvious attempt to please.

    It certainly pleased me with its dancing chorines, slightly risque situations and repartee, and a story line of little consequence. This preceded the screening of The Miracle Man and is an example of the program committee’s wacky and rather endearing habit of scheduling entertainments of vastly different natures, in this case opening Friday’s screenings with a sexy romp that left the audience completely unprepared for the spiritual drama that followed it.

COLIN DEXTER – The Dead of Jericho. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1981. UK edition: Macmillan, hc, 1981. Reprinted many times, including Ivy, pb, December 1996 (shown).

   Inspector Morse is attending a party where he meets Anne Scott and they begin a mild flirtation. Just when they are on the verge of leaving together, Morse is called away on police business. Anne gives him her address in Jericho, a section of Oxford (the town, not the university).

   It isn’t until six months later that Morse finds himself back in her neighborhood to attend a lecture. Calling on her, he finds her front door open but no one answers his calls. He leaves, though he suspects someone is in the house.

   After the lecture he discovers a commotion in her neighborhood and learns she has been found hanging in her kitchen. Though the official verdict is suicide, he decides to poke around on his own. A few days later, the local handyman who recently repaired a garden wall for her is found with his head bashed in.

   Morse is placed in charge and realizes that the two deaths are probably connected since the handyman recently deposited money in his account — money gained by blackmail.

   I suspect that this is one of Dexter’s lesser efforts in the series. Though the writing is serviceable, the plotting is weak, including the fact that [WARNING:] there are twins involved, a fact I realized long before Morse did.

   Also, there must be four or five times that Dexter uses the dreaded “had he but known” or words equivalent to that phrase. That’s something to be avoided.

“Twixt the Cup and the Lip.”   An episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre (Season 2, Episode 27). First air date: 3 June 1965. Larry Blyden, Charles McGraw, John Hoyt, Ethel Merman, Jean Hale, Joan Blackman, John Harmon, Lee Patterson, Lane Bradford. Teleplay: Don Brinkley; based on a story by Julian Symons (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1965). Director: Leon Benson.

    Imagine being fired for being too honest. That’s what happens to Lester Pennell (Larry Blyden), however, when Mr. Orbin (John Hoyt), his boss at an up-scale art gallery, catches Lester being too forthcoming about the value of an item they’re displaying for the French government: a silver sceptre once wielded by Louis XIV. Mr. Orbin and the French say it’s worth $2 million; Lester says it couldn’t be worth a penny over $1.5 million — tops.

    Not only has he been given his two weeks’ notice but Larry also has a falling out with his girl Lucille (Joan Blackman), who accuses him of being a “doormat.”

    Meanwhile, back in Lester’s apartment house his neighbor across the hall, Nick Stacey (Charles McGraw), has stolen two rare books from Lester. Nick, you see, is an ex-cop who got caught taking bribes and is presently, as he says, “at liberty.” (How he missed jail time for his graft is never explained.)

    Down the hall Clara Lovelace (Ethel Merman) and her daughter Lambie (Jean Hale) are under-employed actors waiting for a job.

    Lester is in a dark mood when he catches Nick with his stolen books, dark enough indeed to see how Nick can be of enormous help in exacting revenge on Mr. Orbin. Lester is intimately familiar with the security systems at the gallery — and that silver sceptre just seems to be begging to get ripped off.

    And so Lester evolves a shaky caper that involves Nick and his fence, Pogo (John Harmon), Clara, Lambie, and himself. When you consider that they never have a chance to do a full rehearsal of the robbery because the French ask for the sceptre back days sooner than expected and that Nick and Lambie have ideas of their own for the boodle, you may have already concluded this caper won’t go off anywhere near as planned ….

    However, while you might anticipate the outcome of this one, I seriously doubt you’ll be able to foretell exactly what happens in the fourth act — and why.

    Larry Blyden was a regular fixture on American TV in the ’50s and ’60s, playing amiable yet somehow sinister characters; he also hosted several daytime game shows. He appeared in a couple of episodes of Twilight Zone, one where he winds up in Hell and another in which he’s a ham actor in a TV Western who gets an education from a real cowboy. Blyden even won a Tony Award on Broadway.

    Gruff and gravelly-voiced Charles McGraw is the legendary film noir star (T-Men, Border Incident, Armored Car Robbery, The Narrow Margin, etc.) who could also register integrity if the role called for it (The Bridges at Toko-Ri). He and Ethel Merman appeared together in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World two years earlier.

    Always dependable character actor John Hoyt’s career stretched from the ’40s to the ’80s. He could handle comedy or drama equally well. Science fiction fans may remember him from When Worlds Collide, in which he played a devious, wheelchair-bound billionaire, and as the friendly doctor in the first Star Trek pilot film.

    Julian Symons, upon whose story this show is based, is famous — or infamous, depending on your viewpoint — for the opinions he expressed in his critical survey of mystery fiction, Bloody Murder (a.k.a. Mortal Consequences).

ACE DOUBLE D-59:

    ●   DAVID ALEXANDER – The Corpse in My Bed. Revised edition. Originally published in hardcover as Most Men Don’t Kill (Random House, 1951). Reprint hardcover, under the latter title: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, June 1951.

    ●   ROBERT BLOCH – Spiderweb. Paperback original; 1st printing, 1954. Reprinted by Hardcase Crime (#42), pb, April 2008, backed with Shooting Star, also by Bloch.

   On the shelf right next to the Robert Bloch book [reviewed here not so long ago] was something I couldn’t remember reading for the life of me, so I took Ace Double D-59 with me on vacation.

   Ace Doubles in those days consisted of one original novel — usually by some competent hack — and a reprint. In this case, the reprint was The Corpse in My Bed (originally Most Men Don’t Kill) by David Alexander, which is the sort of thing you’d expect from David Goodis, if David Goodis wrote screwball comedy.

   Terry Rooke is a shell-shocked veteran and ex-bowery-bum, now tyro P.I. who finds himself framed for murder and forced back into his erstwhile skid-row milieu while he finds the real killer.

   Alexander never really evokes the vagrant ethos like Goodis did, and his attempts at comedy are more funny-weird than funny-ha-ha, but the eccentric sleuth of the piece — who enters the story like some figure lowered onstage by ropes in a Greek Play — is in the best tradition of Golden Age Eccentric Sleuths: Tommy Two-Toes is an obese ex-tramp turned millionaire who surrounds himself with a menagerie of exotic animals and bindlestiffs, whom he employs as his legmen.

   He also does his cogitating while smoking an obscene pipe, between fits of gluttony. An engaging character, but I’m afraid I figured out whudunit before he even entered the story.

   Spiderweb, on the flip side, is no more surprising, perhaps, but it’s much more inventive. Basically, it’s Robert Bloch’s take on [William Lindsay Gresham’s] Nightmare Alley, with Hollywood wanna-be Eddie Haines recruited to play life-style guru/front-man for a coterie of extortionists and blackmailers led by an Evil Genius straight out of Von Stroheim: a pudgy, bald guy with a monocle and German accent no less.

   If the characters aren’t terribly original, Bloch at least puts the plot across quickly enough to keep it diverting, as Haines finds himself framed for murder and thrust into the defense of the suckers he’s supposed to be fleecing. Some of this is quite good, actually, and makes one wonder why more of Robert Bloch’s early work never got reprinted.

Editorial Comment:   Tommy Two-Toes, the gent who does the detective work in the Alexander book, also appears in Murder in Black and White (Random House, 1951).

EDWARD S. AARONS – Assignment to Disaster. Gold Medal 491, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1955.

   This is the very first of the Sam Durell adventures, of which there were 42 by Edward S. Aarons through 1976, plus another six by Will B. Aarons which appeared between 1976 and 1983. (For an overview of the series by Doug Bassett, a compete listing of all the books and the complete story behind “Will B. Aarons,” see the primary Mystery*File website, located here.)

   In Assignment to Disaster, Sam’s means of tracking down a missing scientist, the second in command in overseeing an extremely hush-hush project (an orbiting bomb), is through his sister. Of course that means that the baddies are quickly onto her also, and the race is on to see who finds him first.

   I probably don’t need to say that the sister is extremely good-looking, do I? Sam is smitten, which has far reaching consequences for him long after this book is over, and if you’ve dabbled into the series recently, as I have, you’ll know what I mean. (I know, I should read them in order, but they’re not stored that way, and I haven’t.)

   And some of the things I was looking for while I was reading my way through this one, though, were signs that might indicate whether or not it was actually intended to be the first of a series. I’d guess that it was, but that’s all I have, a guess.

   As for any other comments I have, I’ve re-read Doug Bassett’s review of the book (follow the link above), and I think he says everything I was going to, and maybe even better. So why don’t I let him say it?