V. C. CLINTON-BADDELEY – Only a Matter of Time.

Dell, paperback reprint; 1st printing, July 1981; Murder Ink Mystery #23. Hardcover edition: William Morrow, 1970. Prior UK edition: Victor Gollancz, hc, 1969; pb reprint: Arrow, 1974.

   Not knowing very much about the author, and assuming that perhaps that you don’t either, I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing the autobiographical blurb that was included at the end of this book:

   This explains a lot, and I’ll get to that in a moment. His full name, according to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, was V(ictor Vaughan Reynolds Geraint) C(linton) Clinton-Baddeley, 1900-1970, and his mystery writing career consisted of five detective stories that came out between 1967 and 1972, all featuring Dr. R. V. Davie as his continuing series character. (I’ll list the five books at the end of this review.)

   But what struck me when I was reading Only a Matter of Time was how erudite both the author and his sleuth were, and the brief biographical notes above only confirmed my thoughts. Not in a snobbish way, though. Not at all. The author has a dry if not wry sense of humor that had me smiling if not laughing throughout.

   The novel takes place in a small town called King’s Lacy during a week in the summer when a week-long classical music festival is going on.

   The town also has a multitude of antique and small curio shops, and every so often the murder investigation stops and we (the reader) are treated to a knowledgeable discussion involving something to do with the fine arts. Either major or minor tidbits of information, it doesn’t matter, they’re still a treat.

   There is a slow, leisurely pace to this novel. I mentioned a murder investigation, but the first death is not known until the book is half over, although the victim had disappeared some time before that. Dr. Davie cooperates with the police, but since the second victim was known to him, that is his only rationale for continuing to stay involved.

   As the title suggests, you might be wise to keep close tabs on the timing of events, including watches that stop or run erratically and a church bell that does not chime overnight.

   One definition of a cozy mystery is perhaps one in which no commotion occurs when the murder does, and if so, that makes Only a Matter of Time the perfect example of a cozy mystery. The festival is not canceled, the show goes on, and Dr. Davie continues to take his afternoon nap, right on schedule.

   Overall, then? If you don’t mind leisurely, discursive detective novels with plenty of clues and false leads, this is the perfect one for you to try on for size the next time you’re looking for a book precisely like this one to read.

V. C. CLINTON-BADDELEY. Dr. Davie in all. First UK editions only:

      Death’s Bright Dart (n.) Gollancz 1967.

      My Foe Outstretch�d Beneath the Tree (n.) Gollancz 1968.

      Only a Matter of Time (n.) Gollancz 1969.
      No Case for the Police (n.) Gollancz 1970.
      To Study a Long Silence (n.) Gollancz 1972.

MICHAEL CONNELLY – The Overlook. Little Brown & Co, hardcover; first edition, May 2007. Paperback reprint: Vision, January 2008.

   This was originally published as a serial in the New York Times Sunday Magazine with a final chapter added later which I guess accounts for the three years of copyright in the paperback edition (2006, 2007 and 2008). And perhaps for the book being under 300 pages, a rarity nowadays.

   Harry Bosch has recently joined the Homicide Squad at LAPD, and his first case is the murder of Dr. Stanley Kent whose body is found at the Overlook in Hollywood hills. Soon Bosch’s old flame, FBI agent Rachel Walling turns up. She’s a member of the FBI’s Tactical Intelligence Unit and is there because Dr. Kent had access to dangerous radioactive substances which could be used by terrorists.

   Sure enough, it turns out Dr. Kent had removed one hospital’s complete supply of Cesium after receiving a photo showing his nude wife hogtied and gagged in their bedroom with the threat of killing her unless he complied.

   The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are more interested in recovering the stolen Cesium, but Bosch’s main concern is solving the murder and he won’t allow anyone to push him aside no matter how many capital letters are in their name.

   As usual, with Connelly, the story was very well written and the characterization can’t be faulted. What can be faulted is the plotting. Pretty much from the get-go I knew which way the story was heading even if I didn’t know everything about the solution. Too bad his plotting isn’t the equal of his writing.

WHIT HARRISON – Strip the Town Naked. Beacon B-350, paperback original, 1960.

   Whit Harrison is a pseudonym of the prolific Harry Whittington. I’ve read and enjoyed a few books by him, and I read a recommendation for this title a while back, where and by whom now forgotten. It’s another of those books that I bought intending to read soon that has been staring accusingly at me from the to-be-read-soon for far too long.

   This is a typical Whittington (or what, with my limited exposure to him, I take to be a typical Whittington) in that a man falsely imprisoned has returned on his release from jail to his small home town to find the real crook.

   Vic Radford had been one of two partners in an investment company when $92,000 had been stolen from the company safe. Only he and his partner had known the money was there and his partner had an alibi. Radford’s return causes ripples in a town where everybody knows each other, and reignites tensions and not a few passions.

   It took a while to get into the book, but the pace of the story eventually took hold, and I raced to the conclusion.

   It’s really just a potboiler written to the Whittington formula that gives an enjoyable couple of hours. One complaint is that Vic has too many sexual encounters in the two days or so that it takes to clear up the case. All the women that we meet in the town are not only available but more than willing, including his wife, whose masochistic tendencies Radford is happy to oblige.

CORNELL WOOLRICH – The Bride Wore Black. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1940. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft, including: Pocket #271, 2nd printing 1945; Pyramid #80, 1953, as Beware the Lady; Dell D186, 1957, Great Mystery Library #1; Ace G-699; Collier, 1964; Raven House, 1981; Ballantine, July 1984.

Film: Films du Carosse, 1968, as La mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black). Co-screenwriter & director: Francois Truffaut.

   The Bride Wore Black is Cornell Woolich’s first novel and has been reprinted by about half a dozen different paperback houses. If you’ve never read Woolrich, it is a splendid introduction and [when this review was first written] a recent edition from Ballantine may still be available.

   While it is not Woolrich at his very best (for that, you’d have to read pulp novelets like “Goodbye, New York” or later books like Rendezvous in Black, also reprinted by Ballantine), it is very good indeed.

   Woolrich is best known for his heart-stopping suspense, emotional prose, and use of outrageous coincidences. In The Bride Wore Black, we have his usual narrative drive, but the language is a bit more objective than it sometimes is, and the result is a bit less reader involvement than is needed.

   The coincidences are there, in spades, and that makes suspending disbelief a bit tougher than usual. Still, only someone who’s read the best Woolrich would dare to cavil at this book, so don’t miss it if you’ve never read it.

Editorial Comment:   As soon as I’m able, I’ll be posting the three reviews of Woolrich novels that Mike Nevins did for 1001 Midnights, one a day, perhaps, beginning tomorrow. The three: The Bride Wore Black, The Black Curtain, and The Black Angel.

HUGH AUSTIN – The Milkmaid’s Millions. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1948.

   This is the second and apparently last in the “Sultan’s Harem” mysteries. The Sultan is Wm (that’s the way he spells it) Sultan, the only surviving member of Sultan, Sultan & Sultan, counselors at law.

   Wm is thirty-five years old, but talks and thinks as if he were in his seventies. His staff, all female and thus “the harem,” treats him as if he were their grandfather, though his secretary appears to regard him as a possible swain.

   Wm’s main interest in life is compiling his late uncle’s “Life & Letters.” His staff is typing up the forty-second chapter of the second volume, which seems to comprise the twenty-seven thank-you letters the uncle sent for presents received on his fourteenth birthday.

   One shudders to think what the other forty-one chapters in volume two might consist of, and volume one doesn’t bear thinking about at all.

   One of Wm’s few clients has prepared a codicil to his will, having recently discovered a direct descendant, and Wm is called upon to prove the bona fides of the new family member. Shortly after Wm arrives at the client’s home, however, the testator is murdered.

   The investigators think that Wm did it, evidence arises that Wm probably didn’t do it, and then new developments seem to demonstrate that he did indeed do it.

   Wm’s harem, who were responsible for his getting involved in the mess, arrives on the scene to vamp some of the suspects and rig some evidence so that Wm will not be convicted of the crime. Those who enjoy the pedantic and stuffy, mixed with the preposterous, will find this novel delightful. The crime’s rather good, too.

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

         AUSTIN, HUGH. Pseudonym of Hugh Austin Evans.

    It Couldn’t Be Murder (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Peter Quint]
    Murder in Triplicate (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Peter Quint]
    Murder of a Matriarch (n.) Doubleday 1936 [Peter Quint]
    The Upside Down Murders (n.) Doubleday 1937 [Peter Quint]
    The Cock’s Tail Murder (n.) Doubleday 1938 [Peter Quint]

    Lilies for Madame (n.) Doubleday 1938.
    Drink the Green Water (n.) Scribner 1948 [Wm Sultan (Sultan’s Harem)]
    The Milkmaid’s Millions (n.) Scribner 1948 [Wm Sultan (Sultan’s Harem)]
    Death Has Seven Faces (n.) Scribner 1949.

   Peter Quint was a lieutenant in the New York City police department. The small cover image of The Cock’s Tail Murder seen above (by Artzybasheff) is the only one of Austin’s books that I’ve been able to come up with so far in jacket. No other information about the author, other than his real name, seems to be known.

[UPDATE] Later the same day.   British bookseller Jamie Sturgeon has just supplied me with another cover, this one for The Upside Down Murders. It came from a Grosset reprint, but both he and I believe it to be the same as the Crime Club edition. Art by Duggaru:

[UPDATE #2] 10-26-09.   Thanks to the combined efforts of Victor Berch, Jamie Sturgeon and Al Hubin — and Google! — it has been learned that Hugh Austin Evans was born in 1903 and died in 1964.

DAY OF WRATH. 2006. Christopher Lambert, Brian Blessed, Blanca Marsillach, Szonja Oroszlán, James Faulkner, Phillida Law. Written and directed by Adrian Rudomin.

    This has nothing to do with the classic Carl Theodor Dreyer film Der Vredens Tag (1943), but instead is a Hungarian production that’s set in Spain of 1542, fifty years into the Inquisition and its terrors.

   Taking place in a world of opulence and degradation and the excesses of religious zealotry, the film is supposedly based on a true story.

    Lambert plays Ruy de Mendoza, a minor noble, and the newly appointed sheriff of a Spanish province, who finds his life and that of his family at risk when he refuses to ignore a murder on his watch.

    Despite efforts by everyone, including the governor, Lord Francisco del Ruiz (Brian Blessed) to the head of the Inquisition Friar Anselmo (James Faulkner) to keep a conspiracy of silence, Mendoza pushes forward in his investigation.

    In the world of Spain during the Inquisition, birthright was everything, and the slightest taint of Jewish blood was a ticket to financial ruin, torture, and a heretic’s death by fire.

    As Mendoza delves into the mystery, he begins to uncover secrets he should not know and a conspiracy among the leader of the local Inquisition to extort money from noble families with the Jewish taint — including the newly appointed and vainglorious governor, but the truth is darker and more complex than mere religious persecution and zeal.

    A series of murders with the letters D R (for the Latin Day of Wrath) carved into the victims is related to these secrets, and massive keys left on the bodies are part of the answer.

    Finally Mendoza has to put his duty and his family against his blood and his honor in order to survive.

    This is an attractive film, and the story is fascinating, but the script is disjointed and despite some interesting touches (at one point Lambert uses an early form of ballistics to identify a bullet used in a murder), it doesn’t hold together.

    Day of Wrath is a decent time passer, a B movie at heart, with a few “A” touches in costuming and set decoration.

    There is a bit of nice swordplay, a hint of sex, and a masked killer in black and silver, but a better script and direction would have been more helpful in dealing with a conspiracy this complex and with problems this dark.

    The movie ends in a blood bath and a new conspiracy with Lambert’s Mendoza at its head, as it only could, but you have to wish a surer hand had been at the helm. Even with its flaws, there is a good idea here. It just lacks the skilled input needed to develop it fully.

    And I couldn’t help but think while watching it, it might have made a better novel than movie. A little structure would have been a major improvement.

    

SIN TAKES A HOLIDAY. Pathé Exchange, 1930. Constance Bennett, Kenneth MacKenna, Basil Rathbone, Rita La Roy, Zasu Pitts. Director: Paul L. Stein.

   Besides the two “Topper” movies she was in, I don’t think I’ve seen any of the other movies that Constance Bennett made. For a name that’s awfully familiar, not to mention being a beautiful and talented sad-eyed actress, she made a rather large number of awfully forgettable pictures.

   Including this one, I’m sorry to say, one that TCM chose to play on her birthday earlier this week (October 22). She plays the secretary who’s secretly in love with her playboy boss (played by Kenneth MacKenna), a well-known divorce lawyer. But when he proposes to her, it’s with no sense of delight that she accepts.

   It’s a marriage of convenience only. He needs a wife to get one of his many divorcee clients (Rita La Roy) off his back. Little does he know when he sends his new bride off to Europe that she’s going to turn into a glowing beauty. (She also somehow learns to play classical musical pieces on the piano; quite a change from living in a cramped apartment with two other working girls, one of whom is Zasu Pitts.)

   Basil Rathbone plays the jaded bachelor who falls in love with her, and this is the triangle (or quadrilateral, if Miss La Roy is included) that the plot revolves around, and all the more so once the lady’s husband decides that maybe he really does want a wife.

   Being a pre-Code movie, the light-hearted way that men in upper society are allowed to pal around with women who are not their wives would scarcely meet with approval a few years later.

   Unfortunately for those of us who happen to have spent the first 60 plus minutes waiting for a payoff that matches the rest of the film, the wait will have been in vain. There are many many clever ways that this movie could have ended. The way that this movie does end – and don’t worry, I shan’t tell you which one it is — it isn’t one of them.

LAND BEYOND THE LAW. Warner Brothers, 1937. Dick Foran, Linda Perry, Wayne Morris, Harry Woods, Irene Franklin, Frank Orth, Cy Kendall. Director: B. Reeves Eason.

   Walker Martin sent me an email yesterday morning, suggesting that I give you all a heads up on TCM’s lineup of B-Western movies they were going to show all afternoon, all oaters with “Law” in their titles.

   Of course I didn’t see his email until just before the first movie started, but I did get it in time to make sure my tape machine was properly set up and the cable box was set to the right channel. This is the first of the four.

   Plot synopsis: Cowpoke “Chip” Douglas (Dick Foran) is persuaded to become sheriff when his father is killed by rustlers. Complicating matters before his father’s death was the fact that Douglas was riding for the man (Cy Kendall) who’s secretly responsible for all of the gunplay and violence in the area. (Not that it’s much of a secret.)

   Dick Foran is billed as “The Singing Cowboy,” and indeed the chunky, jovial-looking actor has a voice like Nelson Eddy. No wimpy Roy or Gene is he. The opening scene, with the ranch hands riding into town singing like a grand chorus a song that might have been written by Sigmund Romberg, is a sight to be seen, and something even more spectacular to hear.

   This movie is pure horse operetta, through and through. And as thoroughly enjoyable, too, with plenty of plot, lots of action, and a spanking scene to boot!”

MY SISTER EILEEN. Columbia, 1955. Betty Garrett, Janet Leigh, Jack Lemmon, Robert Fosse, Kurt Kasznar, Dick York, Lucy Marlow, Tommy Rall, Horace MacMahon, Hal March, Queenie Smith, Richard Deacon.

Screenplay by Blake Edwards and Richard Quine from the play by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, based on the stories by Ruth McKenny. Songs: Jule Styne and Leo Robin; choreography: Robert Fosse. Director: Richard Quine. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   The inevitable question was asked of Betty Garrett after the screening: Why wasn’t the great Leonard Bernstein score for the Broadway success Wonderful Town used? The answer was that it was economics, that it was cheaper to commission a new score than pay for the use of Bernstein’s.

   Undoubtedly a minus, since the replacement score is undistinguished, but the gorgeous wide-screen technicolor, the charming performances by the cast (especially Garrett, Leigh, Lemmon, Fosse and Rall), and the solid merits ofthe McKenny stories contributed to a smashingly entertaining 72 minutes, with a number by Rall and Fosse, danced in an alley, that lit up the screen with some of the most exciting dancing that side of West Side Story.

   Garrett said that she most missed not being able to sing “Ohio” from the Bernstein original, but she played in the Bernstein musical on Broadway and on the road and didn’t lack for opportunities to sing it.

   I’m still a bit put off by the gradual encroachment of post-1940 films at these conventions, but the opportunity to hear Garrett talk about her career and to see such a splendid example of the fifties film musical pretty much put those concerns to rest.

EDWARD S. AARONS – Assignment-Angelina.

Gold Medal #749, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1958.

   Like many writers from the period 1920-50, Edward S. Aarons began his career in the pulp magazines. He also wrote three mystery novels in the late Thirties, and several more in the late Forties. But it wasn’t until the paperback original boom of the early 1950s that he achieved major success and recognition, with his “Assignment” series of espionage novels featuring the action-packed adventures of CIA agent Sam Durrell.

   Along with exotic locales across the globe, violence is the main ingredient of the Durrell series; a great deal of blood is spilled in a great many different ways, both by Durrell and the various villains he encounters. Assignment-Angelina is typical.

   It begins (rather irresistibly) with the coldblooded murders of four men in four different sections of the country: a filling-station owner in, Arizona, a building contractor in Indiana, an advertising copywriter in New York, and a fisherman in Louisiana.

   We know from the first who is responsible — a trio named Mark, Corbin, and Slago — but we don’t know why. Durrell’s search for the answer leads him to a beautiful woman named Angelina, who may or may not be an ally, and into the usual muddle of James Bondian political intrigue.

   It also leads him from Washington to the bayous of Louisiana (where Durrell is right at home; he is part Cajun) to New York City and ultimately to a mountaintop in the rugged Poconos where the slam-bang finale takes place.

   Despite all the violence and melodrama, this and other Durrell novels are compulsive reading. Aarons, was an accomplished writer, with excellent descriptive abilities (particularly in depicting the various locales of his stories) and an expert sense of narrative pacing.

   A total of forty Sam Durrell books were produced by Aarons from 1955 to 1975, among the more noteworthy of which are Assignment to Disaster (1955), Assignment Stella Marni (1957), Assignment-School for Spies (1966), and Assignment-Sumatra (1974).

   After his death in 1975, a number of additional Durrell novels appeared by Will B. Aarons, said to be his son. Two of Aarons’s non-series books, Escape to Love (1952) and Girl on the Run (1954), are good examples of the paperback-original suspense novels of the early 1950s. A 1948 hardcover, Nightmare, is notable for its high level of tension and drama.

   Aarons also published numerous novels under the pseudonym of Edward Ronns, among them Terror in the Town (1947) Gift of Death (1948), and Catspaw Ordeal (1950); most these were later reprinted in paperback under his own name.

         ———
   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.

Editorial Comment: On the primary Mystery*File website there is a long comprehensive overview of the “Assignment” series by Doug Bassett. Following the article is a long list of all the books in the series, plus a full description of the investigation that took place several years ago which finally discovered the true identity of Will B. Aarons. (Follow the link provided.)

   Two other books in the Sam Durrell series previously been reviewed on this blog are:

       Assignment Stella Marni.

       Assignment Zoraya