REGINALD HILL – Midnight Fugue. HarperCollins, US, hardcover, October 2009. British edition: HarperCollins, hc, 2009.

   Supt. Andy Dalziel has just spent his first week on the job since recovering from injuries he received in Death Comes for the Fat Man. He heads out one Sunday morning, thinking it was Monday, as his telephone was ringing, and winds up in Church where he is approached by Gina Wolfe, who was following him. Unbeknownst to them both, she was being followed by the sister and brother team of Fleur and Vince Delay.

   Gina has come to Yorkshire to ask Andy about her husband Alex, an Inspector at the Met who disappeared almost seven years ago. This was shortly after their daughter had died from leukemia and while he was under suspicion of having relayed information to a black man under investigation named Goldie Gidman. Gidman’s son Dean is now a Tory Member of Parliament and a rising young star of the party (a British Obama since his mother is white) expecting to one day be Prime Minister.

   Now Gina is about to have her husband declared legally dead when she receives a photo in the mail showing Alex in a crowd of onlookers during a visit to Yorkshire by a minor Royal. Gina wants Andy’s unofficial help in finding out if Alex is still alive, while the Delays, in the employ of Goldie Gidman, are also after Alex to silence him permanently.

   It’s always a pleasure to read another Dalziel and Pascoe novel by Mr. Hill, my favorite living crime novelist. Outstanding characterization and clever plotting are in abundance here, and he out-does 24 in that all the action takes place in 18 hours of the same day. Here is also a wonderful ending with Andy restored, in the eyes of his subordinates, back at the top of the Yorkshire Police, and a surprising coda that supplies the justice the law can’t provide.

Previously reviewed on this blog:

   Ruling Passion (by Steve Lewis)

“Crimson Witness.” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Season 3, Episode 12). First air date: 4 January 1965. Peter Lawford, Martha Hyer, Roger C. Carmel, Julie London, Joanna Moore, Alan Baxter, Paul Comi, Larry Thor. Teleplay: Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin. Story: Nigel Elliston. Director: David Friedkin.

   If anybody ever had a strong motivation to commit murder, it’s Ernie Mullett (Peter Lawford), the plant manager of a large firm.

   Ernie’s brother Farnum (Roger C. Carmel) has practically replaced him in everyone’s estimation. His boss (Alan Baxter) has demoted Ernie from manager, putting Farnum in his stead. Ernie’s wife Judith (or Judy — note that name, it’ll prove to be important — played by Martha Hyer) has fallen for Farnum. Even Ernie’s gorgeous secretary and mistress Barbara (Julie London) finds Farnum irresistible. It’s enough to drive a body mad with jealousy, and that’s just what it does.

   Exactly how Ernie deals with this intolerable situation constitutes the remaining three fourths of the play — but I would urge you to pay close attention to the flowers that thread in and out of the story because ultimately they will prove fateful ….

   And you can see Ernie exact revenge on Hulu.

   Even more so than “See the Monkey Dance” (reviewed here ) this episode features a script that sparkles with wit, and all the performers seem to work to achieve it. Morton Fine wrote many episodes for I Spy, The Most Deadly Game, Kojak, The Streets of San Francisco, and one for Banacek (“The Vanishing Chalice”). He often teamed with David Friedkin on their TV projects.

   Peter Lawford has the distinction of playing Ellery Queen in the ’70s pilot for a new series (Ellery Queen: Don’t Look Behind You); he also featured in the original Ocean’s Eleven (1960), as well as playing Nick Charles in 72 episodes of The Thin Man TV series (1957-59).

   Roger C. Carmel was good at playing scoundrels; he was “that insufferable, unprincipled kulak” Harry Mudd in three Star Trek episodes. Beautiful Julie London was in The Fat Man (1951) and Crime Against Joe (1956, and reviewed here ), as well as enjoying a long run on the Emergency TV series.

   And we previously talked about Joanna Moore’s appearance in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode “Who Needs an Enemy?”

HELEN WEST. British TV mini-series: 3 x 90m, ITV1. Episode One: “Deep Sleep” 6 May 2002. Amanda Burton (Helen West), Conor Mullen (Chief Supt. Bailey); with Annabelle Apsion, Dermot Crowley, Harry Eden, Ian Puleston-Davies. Based on the novel by Frances Fyfield.

   In Frances Fyfields’s mystery novels — there are six of them in which Superintendent Bailey teams up with prosecuting attorney Helen West as a top notch crime solving team — his first name is Geoffrey, but I’m not sure whether came up in the TV show or not.

   The three episodes are available in the US as a boxed set entitled The Helen West Casebook. The other two in the set are also based on Ms. Fyfield’s novels:

       1. 06 May 2002. Deep Sleep
       2. 13 May 2002. Shadow Play.
       3. 20 May 2003. A Clear Conscience

   An earlier book was also adapted for television: Trial by Fire (1999); in this one Juliet Stevenson and Jim Carter played the two leading roles. This unaccountably leaves the first book in the series (A Question of Guilt) and the last (Without Consent) as never having been filmed.

   What all this means is that in “Deep Sleep,” based on the third of the novels, we (the viewers) are plunged straight into the series without much introduction, with Helen West undergoing and recovering from surgery and straight into the arms of her lover, Superintendent Bailey. (As a side comment, I cannot see any conflict of interest there, but their public smooching sometimes borders on the unprofessional.)

   I was going to say that maybe they do things differently in England, but I can’t, since maybe they do in this country also, and I just haven’t been paying attention. Dead in this one, though, is the wife of a well-loved pharmacist. Her passing is all but considered to be of natural causes, but a noticeable amount of chloroform in her blood keeps Helen from closing the case.

   Making the story a little more complicated is the fact that the pharmacist’s assistant, whom he seems to have eyes for, is the former wife of one of the officers under Bailey’s command == and the officer in question is not reconciled with the separation, not at all.

   There is also the matter of a kidnapped child, the suspicious death of a neighborhood junkie, and an unexploded bomb discovered while tearing down a row of worn-out tenement buildings.

   It all adds up to a lot of story, as perhaps you can tell. While Helen West takes a rather small role, surprisingly enough, when all is said and done, all of the activity in it certainly revolves about her. Even though this particular episode is far more a crime thriller than it is a work of detective fiction, I enjoyed it anyway. I’ve not watched the other two films in this set, but I shall, and quickly too.

RICHARD SALE – Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep.   Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1936. Paperback reprints: Armed Services Edition #S-7, 1940s. Popular Library 247, 1950.

Strange Cargo. MGM, 1940.   Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Ian Hunter, Peter Lorre, Paul Lukas, Albert Dekker, J. Edward Bromberg, Eduardo Ciannelli. Screenplay: Lawrence Hazard, based on the novel Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep, by Richard Sale. Director: Frank Borzage.

   I’m a deeply spiritual person, in my own shallow, materialistic way, so as the Holidays drew near, I elected to read/ watch something morally uplifting and settled on Richard Sale’s Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep and the movie made from it, Strange Cargo.

   Sale’s book is a taut, gritty, down-and-dirty parable of redemption, dealing Fate to ten convicts trying to escape from a tropical prison hell, written in spare, evocative prose, and filled with action and suspense that somehow doesn’t cheapen the story. It’s also populated with a colorful cast of well-wrought characters, some of whom surprised me from time to time.

   Unlike most parables, Narrow doesn’t shirk from things that were considered shocking in its time, like homosexuality, and pedophilia (still pretty shocking today, but no longer taboo in literature). In short, this is a one-of-a-kind thing, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a good read a little off the beaten path.

   A few years after it was published, Narrow got the MGM treatment, released as Strange Cargo, and should have been an unmitigated disaster, what with Joan Crawford written into the story (by Anita Loos, no less) to redo her Sadie Thompson bit, Clark Gable as an unrepentant and very virile heel, plus a cast of familiar character actors including Albert Dekker, Peter Lorre, Eduardo Cianelli, J. Edward Bromberg and Ian Hunter as the mysterious figure who somehow dominates the action despite Gable and Crawford.

   In fact, this is surprisingly a very effective film, thanks mostly to director Frank Borzage, who steers it deftly between schmaltz and pretentiousness, getting powerful performances from the stars but never letting them run away with the story. And there’s a fine bit from Paul Lukas as a satanic convict not in the book. The scene where he parts company with Hunter and the rest of the group, like an angel cast out of heaven, is one of those creepy, unforgettable movie moments that carry real dramatic weight.

   As a footnote, I might add that despite some cheap sops to the censors, this film was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, I think because it depicts God as a nice guy who tries to help out when he can.

MARTIN M. GOLDSMITH – Detour: An Extraordinary Tale.

O’Bryan House, Publishers; trade paperback, 2005. Hardcover edition: Macauley Co., 1939.

   The people behind O’Bryan House, and that includes Richard Doody who wrote the introduction, have done the fans of noir fiction a tremendous favor in reprinting this book. If you are thinking, “What book?” and I imagine many of you are, you are in exactly the same position I was when I first heard about it.

   Now of course there is the Movie Version, which perhaps you have heard of. If there ever were a poll of noir film fans, the film that is based on this book would have to rank in the top two or three of all time. Forgive me, though, if I don’t review the movie, although I will have to admit that scenes from it were continually in my head when I was reading the book. I’ll review the book, though, if you so allow, and whatever movie you’re thinking of, I never heard of it.

   Let me get back to the “favor” that I mentioned in the first paragraph. There are [at the time of this writing] two copies of the First Edition on ABE, neither of which has a dust jacket. The asking price for the first is $2500, and no, I did not lose the decimal point, so you can get up off your hands and knees and stop looking for it. The second copy is a mere $3500, but that one is signed by Mr. Goldsmith, who died in 1994, with a long inscription, so it is probably worth the money.

   There may be other ways to obtain the paperback edition, but one good way may be to order it from Amazon, and at an even more reasonable $14.95. There should be other outlets where it’s available, and it’s a bargain price, no matter the venue.

   To get started on the review, though, I hope that you don’t mind if I simply start off by quoting to you the first four paragraphs or so.

   Once again, if you are a fan of noir fiction, and if you were to tell me that you could put the book down after reading this, most of the first page, frankly, I wouldn’t believe you.

   One way or another, you’d be lying to me. Either you’re no fan of noir fiction, or you’re picking the book back up again when I’m not looking.

   Telling this first part of the story is a down-on-his-luck jazz musician named Alex Roth. He is heading for California, and Hollywood in particular, since that is where his former live-in girl friend, Sue Harvey, has headed before him, only a week or ten days before they were to have gotten married. (She is the impulsive type, Alex tells the reader.)

   Picking him up in the grey roadster is Charles Haskell, who has a wad of money in his billfold and who is not long for this world. His untimely death is an accident, but Alex knows that no one will believe him, given that small incident (thirty days) in Dallas, and given that he and Haskell do look alike… Well, you get the picture.

   Backing up just a little, from page 32:

   In the meantime, Sue herself is not doing so well. From pages 47-48, she expresses to the reader her distinctly discouraged view of Hollywood, where she is getting by (barely) as a waitress, and not as the star she had thought she was destined to be.

   Or if so, not yet:

   Goldsmith is less convincing as the voice of Sue Harvey than he is speaking as Alex Roth, but his portrayal of her is solidly etched in weariness and desire, and if one of the two of his two leading characters were to be considered hard-boiled, you have to know that it is not Alex.

   And returning to that half of the story, the reader’s brain will yell out in warning (but to no avail) when Alex, in turn, picks up a hitch-hiker, female, a woman named Vera, and man, does the story explode from there, eventually taking a leap with one staggering coincidence that exceeds even the often crazy incoherence of a Cornell Woolrich short story or novel, but in this kind of story, the stops are usually pulled all of the way out, and if they weren’t, you’d complain.

   Backing up one more time, from page 84, after Vera has agreed to the lift, saying as she gets in, “Los Angeles is good enough for me, mister.”

   These are the players. What you have just read includes considerably more quoting than I usually do, but there is little here, I guarantee you, that you will not glean from reading the few sentences of descriptive material on the back cover. There is plenty of story left, and on very nearly every one of the 158 pages in this book, there is another passage as quotable as any one of these.

   To my mind, this is the great undiscovered American novel, told from the underside, and somehow in its understated raciness, marvelously reminiscent of those rather notorious pre-Code days at the movies. Which brings us back around to one of my opening comments. They did make a movie out of this book, did you know?

NINE GIRLS. Columbia, 1944. Ann Harding, Evelyn Keyes, Jinx Falkenburg, Anita Louise, Leslie Brooks, Lynn Merrick, Jeff Donnell, Nina Foch, Shirley Mills, Marcia Mae Jones, Willard Robertson, William Demarest. Based on the play by Wilfred H. Pettitt. Director: Leigh Jason.

   Supposing that you knew that tomboyish Jeff Donnell was sometimes billed as “Miss Jeff Donnell,” or that she played George Gobel’s wife ‘spooky old’ Alice on The George Gobel Show in the mid-1950s, I wouldn’t blame you if you counted up the number of female stars in this movie and found that there were ten. (Alice, by the way, was neither spooky nor old.)

   There is an easy explanation, of course. The nine girls of the title are sorority sisters (including two soon to be pledged), while Ann Harding plays Miss Thornton, their favorite teacher and sorority mother. Anita Louise (playing Paula) has the shortest role in the movie. She’s one of those ultra-cultured creatures who manages to make herself intensely disliked if not hated by each of the other eight girls, and hardly above a little non-sisterly blackmail to get her way.

   Willard Robertson is the State Police officer who investigates Paula’s murder (if you ever see the movie, you will know how infinitely inevitable that event is), while William Demarest plays his dim-witted (and leering) assistant. There is quite a bit to leer at in the movie, too, as all of the girls have quite a variety of clothes to wear, including swim suits. I can’t tell you that this movie, made on a small B-movie budget, was a smash hit at the box office, but with nine girls in it, if it was, I can tell you who the attractions were.

   What I can’t tell you is which girl played what part. Some, those who had larger roles, I can, if you’re interested, but Evelyn Keyes (of Johnny O’Clock fame, among others) had a large portion of the dialogue, and so did tall statuesque Jinx Falkenburg, who probably had the shortest movie career of any of them.

   Lynn Merrick, whom I didn’t know before now, does a smash-up imitation of Katharine Hepburn, but only when there’s a man in the vicinity.

   Nina Foch (also later in Johnny O’Clock) did not have a high billing this early in her career, but she was perhaps the most noticeable of the eight girls, all suspects, cooped up together in a vacation lodge while the police do their thing. (She’s the mousy girl with glasses who was forced by the dead girl to write papers for her.)

   Personally, from the mystery end of things, I think the killer’s identity was revealed 10 or 15 minutes too early, but on the other hand, detection in an isolated manor house is or was not the primary reason this movie was made. View it as a light-hearted high spirited comedy instead, with lots of spooky moments during the night and silly antics and corny jokes all of the rest of time.

   If you enjoy silly antics and corny jokes, you’ll like this movie as much as I did.

AARON MARC STEIN – The Case of the Absent-Minded Professor. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1943. Digest-sized paperback reprint: Mystery Novel Classic #82, no date stated (mid-1940s).

   In this, apparently their fourth, investigation, Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt, archaeologists, are at an “appendage to a football stadium that called itself a university” to check the authenticity of pre-Columbian gold ornaments recently donated to Ihe school. The only real scholar at the university is the absent-minded Alf Chambers, professor of anthropology.

   Although alcohol presumably makes him deathly ill, he seemingly becomes drunk one evening, during which time he believes he committed a murder. If he didn’t, somebody else definitely did. Mulligan and Hunt clear things up in a rather blah novel.

Editorial Comment:   Bill was correct in his assertion that this was the fourth of the Tim Mulligan / Elsa Mae Hunt mysteries. There were 18 in all, the first being The Sun Is a Witness (1940) and the last Moonmilk and Murder (1955). After this long run, Stein switched to engineer-for-hire Matt Erridge as a series character, the latter appearing in 23 novels, beginning in 1958.

   Note: This quickie summary does not include the long list of books Stein wrote as George Bagby, most of them featuring Inspector Schmidt of New York City Homicide, he of the long-aching feet; and another 18 “Gibby and Mac” books he wrote as Hampton Stone. See one of Mike Nevins’ earlier columns on this blog for more details.

JANE EYRE. 20th Century-Fox, 1944. Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, Margaret O’Brien, Peggy Ann Garner, John Sutton, Sara Allgood, Henry Daniell, Agnes Moorehead, Aubrey Mather, Edith Barrett, Mrs. Fairfax, Barbara Everes, Hillary Brooke. Screenplay: John Houseman, Aldous Huxley, Robert Stevenson & Henry Koster (the latter uncredited), based on the novel by Charlotte Brontë. Director: Robert Stevenson.

   Last night as I sat up until 2:00 a.m. engrossed in a showing of the 20th Century Fox version of Jane Eyre, I alternately cursed the frequent interruptions for the promotion of albums like Motels & Memories and local entrepreneurs like Mother’s Pizza (“Just like you remember it, only it really wasn’t ever this good!”) and revelled in the superb Dickensian detail of the sequences at Linwood School dominated by Henry Daniell’s marvelous portrayal of the sadistic religious fanati,c, Broadhurst.

   I was moved by the moody, romantic sweep of the episodes at Rochester’s estate, with the brilliant portrayal of mad Mrs. Rochester’s husband by Orson Welles, supported by one of composer Bernard Herrmann’s finest scores.

   The film is one of those meticulous re-creations of a literary classic that David Selznick, in particular, was gifted in bringing to life on the screen, but it has, at moments, something which such films often do not have: imaginative camera work which makes portions of the film seem as fresh as they did thirty-five years ago and confirms for me the rumors that Welles, coming to this project after Citizen Kane and the abortive Magnificent Ambersons, co-directed certain scenes.

   I thought I detected Wellesian touches in Jane’s introduction to Rochester at the manor; in the handling of the brief scene with Agnes Moorehead at the beginning as the camera in a sardonic low-angle shot accented the self-satisfied cruelty of Jane’s aunt and cousin; and in the exterior shots of the great house that squats malevolently at the film’s center, with its battlements and moody lighting that inevitably remind the viewer of Kane’s estate.

   You will get some idea of the quality of the team that was assembled for this film when I tell you that two of the script-writers were Aldous Huxley and John Houseman and that, in addition to Welles, Daniell, Moorehead, and Joan Fontaine (as Jane), there are splendid performances by a group of actors that can only serve to remind us of the talent that was still available to the major studios in the early forties: Elizabeth Taylor, Peggy Ann Garner, Margaret O’Brien, Sara Allgood, John Sutton (in an uncommonly fine portrayal of Broadhurst’s sympathetic alter ego, Dr. Rivers), and other players whose names are less familiar but whose faces are indelibly imprinted on our memories of films of the period.

   I was struck by the beauty of a line delivered by Welles as he described Jane’s first sight of Mrs. Rochester, “Look at Jane, all grave and silent at the mouth of Hell,” and bothered by the jarring modernity of another line describing Mrs. Rochester after her fatal leap as she “lay smashed on the pavement.”

   I was riveted by a shot of Moorehead looking like a grinning Medusa and by the long shot of the wedding ceremony with the ominous entrance of an unseen “Guest” glimpsed only at first as a shadow slipping by against a shaft of light suddenly striking a sacristy wall.

   And I was intrigued by the obvious attempt to introduce fairy-tale elements into the narrative, with the climax clearly using devices from “Beauty and the Beast” that could not have been accidental.

   In short, I was overwhelmed by the intelligence, craftsmanship, and beauty of this film and reminded that film history is filled with superb movies that are often only entries in an edition of Movies That May Be Seen as Interruptions of Late-Night TV Commercials.

LUCAS WEBB – Eli’s Road. Doubleday, hardcover, 1971. Reprint paperback: Popular Library, no date stated.

    I went back to the used book store to buy the copy of Green Ice they’ve had there for years, and got distracted once again. This time by a novel called Eli’s Road, by Lucas Webb.

    Considering the quality of this thing, I’m surprised Webb and his novel aren’t better known. It starts off a bit awkward, but soon gets the reader involved in a 1st person narrative spanning ante-bellum Kansas to 1880s Wyoming.

   Webb does a remarkable job of keeping his narrator believable from the time he writes as a callow teen-ager till he ends up in stoic middle-age, quite a feat of style, and the story: Bloody Kansas, rogue mountain men, orphan girls, pro-slavers, store-keepers, abolitionists, border ruffians, emigrants, freed slaves … and the mysterious Brother Frank.

   Seek it out.

[Editorial Comment]   I wish I had a copy of the paperback reprint to show you. The jacket of the hardcover edition, which perhaps sold to libraries and no one else, is rather plain and uninspiring, to say the least. The paperback is a lot more colorful and inviting, if you’re a fan of western sagas, and it has a quote from noted author Stephen Longstreet to boot:   “The Best Novel of the American West since The Big Sky.” No small praise.

     Lucas Webb is stated on the Web to be the pen name of Michael Burgess. Burgess is also well-noted as bibliographer R. Reginald (Cumulative Paperback Index, 1939-1959, among many others).

   But while Burgess did use Lucas Webb at least once as a pseudonym, an online bibliography for him does not include either Eli’s Road or one later novel under the Lucas Webb byline, a book called Stribling (Doubleday, 1973), about which I have found very little to date, only one quote:   “But there was no place to go to farm or settle; the farms were being deserted, the big combines tractoring out the shacks and the little fields…”

“The Rise and Fall of Eddie Carew.” An episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre (Season 2, Episode 30). First air date: 24 June 1965. Dean Jones, Sheilah Wells, Alan Hewitt, Jerome Cowan, Harry Townes, Ken Lynch, Stanley Adams, Ian Wolfe, John Hubbard, Barry Kelley. Story: Robert Thom; adaptation: Don Brinkley. Director: Joseph Pevney.

   Senile nonagenarian Ellis Stone (Ian Wolfe) manages to get himself locked in the vault of his own bank; unless he’s very good at holding his breath, by the time the electronic lock opens the door three days hence he’ll be very dead.

   The bank manager, in full panic mode, phones Sam Becker (Jerome Cowan), the public relations man for “our party.” He immediately sees the PR disaster (not to mention the financial catastrophe) that he and his cronies would suffer if dotty old Stone, a million-dollar-a-year party contributor, were to go toes up.

   In a moment of inspiration, he plumps for making use of the talents of Eddie Carew (Dean Jones), “The Human Can Opener,” currently serving time in the state pen.

   But Dr. Farley (Harry Townes), the prison psychiatrist, has been making progress weening Eddie away from his compulsion to steal and is flatly opposed to letting Eddie anywhere near piles of money. It would be, as he says, like having an alcoholic become a wine taster.

   The prison warden (Alan Hewitt) overrules the doctor, however, and takes Eddie to the bank. Before he goes, Eddie tries to warn everyone of what could happen; but even his girlfriend, Sally McClure (Sheilah Wells), encourages him to do this because she has faith in his rehabilitation.

   Eddie is now in a position to call the shots: no prison uniform (“something in charcoal gray” would be nice) or handcuffs, deciding who can be present when he does the job (others can be a distraction), and especially having “the best jelly man in the business,” Pinky Ferguson (Stanley Adams), assist him.

   Yes, you guessed it: Eddie has ideas that go way beyond rescuing the old guy, which he almost betrays when he first lays eyes on the safe. (“Well,” says Becker, “is he going to open it or make love to it?”)

   What Eddie doesn’t know is that before the sun rises he will have to crack this same safe three times: once out of greed, once out of duty (and self-interest), and once out of love ….

   This one has a great comic cast as well as normally serious actors doing a humorous turn. Dean Jones is well-known for the many Disney films he’s appeared in. Stanley Adams always seemed to be an affable fast-talker just on the other side of the law (e.g., Cyrano Jones in the immensely popular Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”).

   And Ken Lynch must have played a cop hundreds of times over the years. Jerome Cowan was a low-rent version of William Powell; he could do light comedy (Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.), but most movie fans remember him as Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon and the spineless architect in The Fountainhead.