HARRY WHITTINGTON – Fires That Destroy. Gold Medal #190, paperback original; 1st printing, 1951; 2nd printing: #831, 1958. Reprint paperback: Black Lizard, 1988.

    Some guys have all the luck. Blondes have more fun. You’ve heard the cliches. But at the faceless corporation where Bernice Harper works, pretty girls get all the promotions.

    And it pisses her off.

    That’s the central theme in Fires That Destroy, a tight little noir novel from 1951 by Harry Whittington.

    Year in and year out, she watches through her thick-lensed glasses as sexy babes in tight skirts use their attributes to glide effortlessly up the ladder while Bernice, plain and stringy-haired, stays mired in the steno pool.

    She builds up a reservoir of resentment, which eventually morphs into self-hatred when her boss recommends her for the position of private secretary in the home of an important client. Problem is, he’s blind.

    She knows they foisted her off on a blind man, almost as a joke, and she doesn’t like it. Things are made worse when she learns he’s a heavy drinker who never tires of making passes. This intensifies her hatred, as she knows that he wouldn’t come near her if he could see.

    And so begins her descent into hell.

    The novel actually opens with Bernice looking down a staircase at the blind man’s twisted corpse. She’s just pushed him down the stairs to his death. In the dark silence of the house, a grandfather clock chimes, freaking her out. She thinks, “The sound of a clock and I’m paralyzed. How will I stand the rest of it?”

    Not very well, actually. Whittington ratchets up the stakes for Bernice in nearly every scene. But she’s so consumed by her hateful obsession with the world she inhabits that she can’t rescue herself. Her unraveling forms the spine of the story.

    In a masterful stroke, Whittington takes the reader deep into Bernice’s mind, as she slowly disintegrates into “the most depraved and sinful woman on the face of the earth.” Her interior dialogue with herself evokes Jim Thompson at his most dangerous.

    Whittington wrote over 170 novels in his astonishing career, hopping around through various genres. Most of his work, unfortunately, is out of print, but noir aficionados should make a point of locating a copy of Fires That Destroy.

BILL PRONZINI – Gun in Cheek: A Study of Alternative Crime Fiction. Coward McCann & Geoghegan, 1982, hardcover, 1982. Trade paperback: Mysterious Press, 1987.

    CONTENTS:

Introduction by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter)

“Without Malice, A Forethought” by Bill Pronzini

1. Wanna Woo-Woo?

    “Someone standing inside the body of the black cat would be able to fire a revolver through its mouth!”

2. The Eyes Have It

    “He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled. Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I’d ever heard of.”

3. Cheez It, the Cops!

    “Since when did you get around to using all those two-syllable words?”

4. The Saga of the Risen Phoenix

    “A sudden thought bounced her heart to her larynx.”

5. The Goonbarrow and Other Jolly Old Corpses

    “In plain English, Patterson,” said Pye, “nix on the gats!”

6. Dogs, Swine, Skunks, and Assorted Asses

    “And here I slave over a hot tommygun all day!”

7. C-H-I-N-K-S!

    “Think of it! A pretty girl to cuddle up to on cold nights and her shirt-tail to keep your feet warm. Bully, my boy, bully! Maybe a couple of little dingy-dingies coming along to call you ‘papa’.”

8. The Vanishing Cracksman, the Norman Conquest, and the Death Merchant

    “The vicissitudes of a capricious fate are indeed inconsistent and incommensurable!”

9. In the Name of God — WHOSE HAND?

    “Your toe went up the staircase?”

10. The Idiot Heroine in the Attic

    “In the warm glow of happiness that enveloped her, the caption on the billboard did not strike her as even faintly ominous. It said, “Fly Now — Pay Later’.”

11. Don’t Tell Me You’ve Got a Heater in Your Girdle, Madam!

    “My jaw bounced off the back of my skull and I wallowed in the softness of a cloud. I groped around for my brain and after a couple of years it came back from San Francisco and said ‘Get up!'”

12. Ante-Bellem Days; or, “My Roscoe Sneezed: Ka-chee!”

    “Drop that corpse, you fool!”

Editorial Comment: Thanks to Mike Tooney for providing the quotes. We both believe that if you’ve read this post without cracking up out loud at least three times, you ought to see a doctor.

BILL PRONZINI – Gun in Cheek: A Study of Alternative Crime Fiction. Coward McCann & Geoghegan, 1982, hardcover, 1982. Trade paperback: Mysterious Press, 1987.

   Gun in Cheek is Bill Pronzini’s backhanded salute to the “Best of the Worst,” books and stories that pushed the envelope of language to the breaking point and beyond. The blurb on the back says it all:

   But they’re not all hardboiled. Gladys Mitchell is Pronzini’s target in Chapter Five: “…Mitchell’s prose is of the eccentric variety, to put it mildly — something of a cross between Christie and P. G. Wodehouse, with a dollop or two of Saki, or maybe John Collier, thrown in — and, like garlic and rutabagas, is an acquired taste.”

   Of course, Pronzini’s criticism is supported by only one example: The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop. Nevertheless, as Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) says of Pronzini in his Introduction, “He has obviously read and digested everything ever written in the genre by anyone anywhere,” so his judgment in these matters is to be respected.

   Gothic mysteries are examined in Chapter Ten, which begins with a famous Donald Westlake quote: “A gothic is a story about a girl who gets a house”; but the variations rung in on the Gothic theme can go far afield, as Pronzini amply demonstrates.

   Ed McBain feigns injury in the Introduction, wounded by Pronzini’s ignoring some of the bad writing McBain himself was guilty of, and produces examples of his own as proof that even the best writers can nod now and then over their typewriters — and what does this say about editors?

   Pronzini discusses some works at great length, such as (in Chapter Seven) The Dragon Strikes Back by Tom Roan (1936), an extravaganza so over the top that it leaves Pronzini wishing its author had produced more of the same.

   (If Ian Fleming ever denied having cribbed from The Dragon Strikes Back when he wrote Dr. No, he must have been lying, especially with its element of a renegade group trying to initiate a world war among the superpowers — how many times have those drearily formulaic Bond films used that very notion?)

   Chapter Four affectionately deals with Phoenix Press, whose stable of “alternative” authors boggles the mind, and among whom was Harry Stephen Keeler, “the once-popular ‘wild man’ of the mystery, who seems to have been cheerfully daft and whose plots defy logic and the suspension of ANYONE’S disbelief.”

   (Sidebar: Keeler offered his plotting schemes for sale to the public. That’s a lot like you teaching your cat Tiddles to play Chopin’s ‘Piano Concerto in F Minor’ : No matter how good he gets at chording, his feet will never reach the foot pedals — and Keeler’s “feet” never did.)

   You’ll probably enjoy Gun in Cheek, but three cautions:

   ● One (for parents): There is some coarse language.

   ● Two: Spoiler Alerts, for Pronzini happily reveals the endings in a few cases.

   ● Three: Don’t try to read this book in one sitting because it just might make you dizzy — with laughter.

J. G. BALLARD – Running Wild. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1988. Farrar Straus Giroux, US, hc, 1989; trade ppbk, April 1999.

   J.G. Ballard might be called science fiction’s poet of the apocalypse. His stunning early science fiction novels, The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Crystal World were like nothing anyone else had written and nothing readers had encountered.

   He had taken the Wellsian science fiction novel as practiced by John Wyndham and John Christopher and carried it about as far as it could go.

   He followed that with stunning novels that have no real genre but their own, Concrete Island, High Rise, and Crash among them.

   Running Wild was his first crime novel, and as stunning and apocalyptic as his science fiction. The book is a mere 88 pages long and should not be difficult to find.

   Shortly after 8 o’clock in the morning on June 25th, 1988 the “Pangbourne Massacre,” as it came to be known in the press, took place. All 32 adult residents of the exclusive gated community just West of London were murdered, and the children have gone missing, presumed abducted. Is it a work of a madman, terrorism, or something worse?

   Dr. Richard Greville the Deputy Psychiatric Advisor to the Metropolitan Police is called in to lead the investigation, but what he uncovers is at first more puzzling than the crime itself and gradually too horrible to face:

   Ballard’s protagonist investigates the crime and begins to dissect it with care as the horrible truth begins to dawn on him. Like Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Running Wild is the rare mystery where the solution is more horrible than the crime itself.

   Told in a cool clinical style, the short novel build to a tremendous power. Even once you start to grasp the truth, you may, like the officials at the end of the novel, reject it as just too horrible to face.

   Perhaps one line of the novel sums up Ballard’s theme and his point:

   Edgar Allan Poe said something very like that when he observed that madness might be the highest form of sanity. Like Poe, Ballard has written a work about the dark corners of the human psyche, and the evil men do with the best of motives and in the name of the greatest kindness.

   Before his recent death Ballard wrote at least two more crime novels , Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. Both are superior works, but neither is the stunner this one is.

   Few horror novels can claim to have the impact of this compellingly clinical novel about an unthinkable crime, one that has been all too prescient in light of terrors in our own modern world.

   The frights of Ballard’s short novel are more potent than any witches, werewolves, or vampires — they are the everyday terrors that are the all too real stuff of the nightly news.

GUNRUSH. Made-for-TV movie: ITV, 23 August 2009. Timothy Spall, Deborah Findlay, David Harewood, Paul Kaye. Teleplay: Richard Cottan. Director: Richard Clark.

    This was a highly touted production with gushing previews in The Radio Times about the state of Britain today and serious dramas about the common man standing up against the threat of teenage hoodlums out to destroy the British way of life.

    In fact it was silly nonsense with outrageous stereotypes behaving in a ridiculous manner, with unbelievable story lines. It was probably supposed to be real life rather than “crime drama,” but the story asked you to accept such ridiculous behaviour from so many characters, including the police, and used outrageous coincidence that it was unbelievable.

    The story was about how the teenage daughter of a middle-aged couple in London was fatally shot by two disaffected black youths while queuing to buy goods in the local store. The father (Timothy Spall, center above), dismayed by the thought that police weren’t acting, stole evidence and then set out to find the culprits himself, leading to a violent — and wholly unbelievable — conclusion.

   Poor stuff.

JUNE THOMSON – Sound Evidence. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1985. UK edition: Constable, hc, 1984.

   Detective Chief Inspector Jack Rudd is back looking into the puzzling case of the murder of an unidentified young man who has been camping in a house due for demolition. Rudd is also struggling with his attraction to the locum for the police surgeon, Marion Greave, a compassionate woman who is ready to be his friend.

   Thomson draws her people with care. There’s young, handsome Ray Chivers, amoral and out for what he can get. There’s lonely old Stanley Aspinell, whose one recreation is chess, and one interest a vacant house, Holly Lodge.

   There’s Hugo Bannister, well-to-do civil servant with a fatal weakness for young, attractive men. There’s Sergeant Munroe, fresh from London, who’s sharp and knowing it, and who raises the hackles of Rudd’s more pedestrian Sergeant Boyce.

   The story is built with quiet care: the homosexual affair, the robbery and murder, the missing money, the brutal murders. The suspense is spoiled by an early telegraphing of the murderer’s identity, and Thomson’s low-key approach keeps the excitement down.

   Still, a good read.

Editorial Comment:   Previously reviewed by Maryell Cleary on this blog was June Thomson’s Not One of Us, the first book in the “Inspector Rudd” series.

WOMEN’S PRISON. Columbia, 1955. Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Cleo Moore, Audrey Totter, Phyllis Thaxter, Howard Duff, Warren Stevens, Gertrude Michael, Mae Clarke, Barry Kelley, Vivian Marshall, Adelle August, Juanita Moore, Ross Elliott, Murray Alper, Frank Jenks, Lorna Thayer, Eddie Foy III. Director: Lewis Seiler. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   In the midst of the corny but eminently watchable antics at a coed prison, Audrey Totter gives a touching performance (with a deathbed scene to boot) and was the last of the Career Achievement Award honorees to appear and be interviewed after the screening.

   Lupino is the psychotic women’s superintendent constantly sparring with her (at the time) real-life husband Howard Duff, playing the prison doctor with a big heart for the incarcerated dames.

   I was surprised to note that Eddie Foy III was in the cast (I don’t remember seeing his unforgettable kisser in the film) but Sterling, Moore (Juanita and Cleo), and Thaxter all manage to establish their presence among the large cast, and when Lupino goes bonkers, I almost melted from pure joy. (I don’t remember her as being this deliciously over-the-top since her big courtroom scene in They Drive by Night.)

H. PAUL JEFFERS – Murder on Mike. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1984. Ballantine, reprint paperback, 1988. Júcar, Colección Etiqueta Negra nº21, 1987, Barcelona, as Muerte al micrófono.

   A small but persistent trend in recent years is the retrospective private-eye novel — the nostalgic adventures of PI’s operating in the Thirties and Forties, contemporary recreations of a bygone era.

   Andrew Bergman, Stuart Kaminsky, and Max Allan Collins have each done quite well with Chandleresque heroes of this sort; judging from the two Harry McNeil novels published to date — Rubout at the Onyx Club (1982) and Murder on Mike — H. Paul Jeffers will, too.

   McNeil is a very likable character, “an ex-cop who’s now a private investigator who’d prefer nothing better than to play clarinet with a top jazz band and leave the detective work to better guys,” a shamus who uses his head and his legs and his heart in lieu of violence. Harry McNeil, “the help of the hopeless.”

   It is a few days before Christmas, 1939. Harry is in his office above the Onyx Club on Fifty-Second Street, New York City. Enter Maggie Skeffington, a radio actress on “Detective Fitzroy’s Casebook” on the Blue Network (NBC).

   A few days earlier, Derek Worthington, the star of the show and a man heartily disliked by his co-workers, was shot to death in Studio 6B at Radio City; and Maggie’s boyfriend, announcer David Reed, has been arrested for the crime. Maggie is convinced that David is innocent, even though he is the only member of the cast and crew who does not have an airtight alibi for the time of the shooting.

   Harry takes the case, of course. And meets the various suspects: J. William Richards, owner of the Mellow-Gold Coffee Company and the show’s sponsor; Miles Flanagan, the producer; Veronica Blake, the head writer (with whom Harry later has an affair); Jason Patrick, Worthington’s costar; Rita DeLong, an aging musician; Guff Taylor, the engineer; and Jerry Nolan, the expert sound-effects man.

   Any of the lot might have killed Worthington — except for those alibis. The key to cracking the case lies with young Robby Miller, a Radio City tour guide, who heard the fatal shot fired through a studio mike someone inadvertently left open and who has turned up missing….

   The mystery here is lightweight but entertaining — until its resolution. The final unmasking, which Harry brings about in Studio 6B on Christmas day with the aid of a self-written radio script, is far-fetched and highly derivative of a famous novel by a certain popular Golden Age writer.

   That part of Murder on Mike is disappointing. Still, there is Harry. There is New York at Yuletide 1939, “a city for dreamers because it was a city that could make dreams come true,” a city full of fascinating real-life characters — Winchell, Woolcott, Ed Sullivan, and comedian Fred Allen (both of whom have speaking parts), dozens more.

   There is an equally fine evocation of the world of dramatic radio (a subject Jeffers knows intimately: He works for a Manhattan radio station). And there is a nice, old-fashioned flavor to the narrative, a feeling that you are reading a combination of whodunit and bittersweet private-eye romance written in 1939.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

H. PAUL JEFFERS, R. I. P. (1934-2009). According to a short online obituary in the Pottstown (PA) Mercury, H. Paul Jeffers died on Friday, December 4th, in Manhattan.

   Besides his fictional work (see below), in the 60s he was a Fulbright Scholar in the 1960s and reported from Vietnam with Peter Jennings. He later wrote news for WINS, WABC, WNBC, and WCBS, all in New York City. His non-fiction work included books on history, Westerns and biographies, including books on Theodore Roosevelt and Sherlock Holmes.

   The covers and titles of the books below may give you an idea of the wide range of his interests. If his non-fiction were to be included, the range would be even wider.

   The Harry MacNeil series:

      1. Rubout At the Onyx (1981)
      2. Murder On Mike (1984)
      3. The Rag Doll Murder (1987)

   The Morgan western series:

      1. Morgan (1989)
      2. Blood On the Nueces (1989)
      3. Texas Bounty (1989)

   The Sergeant John Bogdanovic series:

      1. A Grand Night For Murder (1995)
      2. Reader’s Guide to Murder (1996)

      3. Corpus Corpus (1998)

   The Arlene Flynn series:

      1. What Mommy Said (1997)

   The Nick Chase series, as by Harry Paul Lonsdale

      1. Where There’s Smoke, There’s Murder (1999)
      2. Smoking Out a Killer (2000)

      3. Up in Smoke (2001)

   The Kate Fallon series, as by M. T. Jefferson

      1. In the Mood for Murder (2000)

      2. The Victory Dance Murder (2000)
      3. Decorated for Murder (2002)

    Other Novels:

      Adventures of the Stalwart Companions (1981)

      Murder Most Irregular (1983)

      Portrait in Murder and Gay Colours (1985)
      Gods and Lovers (1989)
      Secret Orders (1989)
      Owlhoot Trail (1990)
      Tombstone Revenge (1991)
      The Forgotten Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2005)
      The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Stalwart Companions (2010)

ELLERY QUEEN – The Finishing Stroke. Simon & Schuster, hc, 1958. Paperback reprints include: Cardinal C-343, March 1959; Signet P3142, May 1967; Carroll & Graf, 1988.

   Thirty years after the fact, I still recall the anticipation with which I awaited the paperback reprint of Ellery Queen’s The Finishing Stroke. Hardcover reviews had described it as a throwback to the great masterpieces of fair-play deduction of the 1930s.

   If it wasn’t quite The Egyptian Cross Mystery or The Tragedy of X, it was nonetheless a fine detective story, and I was not disappointed then, nor should readers of Carroll and Graf’s recent reprint.

   Queenian scholar Francis M. Nevins has pointed to the implausibility and stylized nature of The Finishing Stroke, and objectively I can understand his viewpoint. I, however, had little trouble suspending disbelief and relishing a book whose setting is a 1929 Christmas house party with an assorted group of people stranded by that old cliche, the snow storm.

   The cast of characters includes the young Ellery Queen, who has just published his first novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, and “the Maestro,” as Sgt. Velie used to call him, is in good form solving the bizarre happenings in what I considered the best book in the last two decades of the writing career of Dannay and Lee.

RIVER BEAT. Eros Films (UK) / Lippert Pictures (US), 1954. John Bentley, Phyllis Kirk, Leonard White, Glyn Houston, Patrick Jordan, Robert Ayres. Director: Guy Green.

   This is one of a small host of British movies made in the 1950s for which they imported a semi-star from the US, or a fading one, in order to boost its marketability in the States, and maybe boost audiences in the UK as well.

   Not that Phyllis Kirk was a star that anyone in England had heard of at the time, I don’t imagine, but she had been in the US hit House of Wax (the one with Vincent Price in 3D) which I first saw when I was eleven, and I’ve been madly in love with her ever since.

   A petite and decidedly pretty brunette, she had very little future in noir films (of which this is one, but only by the widest of definitions) since she was radiantly and too obviously innocent (in this case) of smuggling diamonds into England from the ocean-going liner which she’s the radio operator for.

   No, even though she’s arrested twice for being involved, it’s a complete frame-up, and even Detective Inspector Dan Barker (John Bentley) knows it, even though the incidents do complicate the romance and growing attraction between them.

   John Bentley, among other roles, played Paul Temple three times, and John Creasey’s “Toff” twice. He’s stalwart, handsome and strong, and he’s 100% right for the three roles: this one and the other two, which I can easily tell you, even though I’ve yet to see him in the other two.

   Phyllis Kirk, who of course was the primary reason I watched this otherwise fairly ordinary crime film, later when on to play Nora Charles opposite Peter Lawford for two seasons of the TV version of The Thin Man, of which I am sure I watched every episode. And some more than once. (I have the series on collector edition DVDs, and no, it doesn’t hold up very well today. Perhaps it never did.)

   The major problem with this movie, the one at hand, though, is that the crime involved, and how it’s committed, makes no sense at all. That is, it doesn’t once the movie ends and you back up and start running it through your mind again.

   While you’re watching, though, it’s suspenseful enough for me to recommend it to you on that basis alone, although some might say, and truthfully so, that the early pace is slow.

   As you can see, I’m somewhat split on this, but another huge plus is the well-guided black and white photography, with much of the movie filmed on location.

   All in all, it made for a decent start for director Guy Green, whose debut this was. He later went on to helm such ventures as Diamond Head, A Patch of Blue, and Luther, among a few other films whose titles you will recognize much more readily than you will this one.