LISA LUTZ – The Spellman Files. Simon & Schuster, hardcover; First Edition: March 2007. Trade paperback: February 2008. Mass market pb: Pocket, January 2009.

   This darkly humorous series debut is told in the first person from the point of view of Isabel Spellman, a P.I. in her family’s San Francisco firm.

   The organization of this book is a post-modern revelation. Ostensibly it’s a series of reports in the case file that Isabel produces as she’s trying to track down her missing 14-year-old sister Rae, who is already skilled in certain investigative techniques.

   In the process, a cold case from her parents’ archives also comes into play. There are sections and subdivisions, rather than traditional chapters. The text utilizes footnotes, varying type fonts, and passages of script-like dialogue.

   This organized chaos accurately maps Isabel’s character — as an investigator, she’s trained to record everything, and she does so obsessively, in part because she’s a bit of a basket case. A fantastic academic challenge would be to try to outline the various chunks of the novel; I may yet try to do this.

   Have I mentioned this book is very funny? Although the 14-year-old has disappeared, no kidnap is involved. In the end, it’s not a traditional crime novel at all; it’s a portrait of a very quirky family, as seen by its most messed-up member.

       The Spellman series —

    1. The Spellman Files (2007)
    2. Curse of the Spellmans (2008)
    3. Revenge of the Spellmans (2009)

    4. The Spellmans Strike Again (March 2010)

DEAR MURDERER. General Films, UK, 1947; Universal, US, 1948. Eric Portman, Greta Gynt, Dennis Price, Jack Warner, Maxwell Reed, Hazel Court, Jane Hylton. Director: Arthur Crabtree.

   By one of those fruity coincidences that happen only in real life, I followed up Othello [with my comments posted here] with two movies about cuckolds driven to murder.

   The first of these, Dear Murderer, offers Eric Portman as a clever but self-deluded husband out to win back his wife’s affections by murdering her seducer — and getting the victim to help him plan the crrime.

   What follows is a twisty-turny cat-and-mouse game between the killer, his victim, his wife and the police, done with wit and sophistication in the vein of Dial M for Murder, which it pre-dated by five years.

   To say any more about the story would give away secrets, but I should mention that the writing, playing and direction are all first-rate.

   Based on a play by St John Legh Clowes, who adapted No Orchids for Miss Blandish for the screen, and scandalized England in the process, Murderer moves along beautifully, with a twist in the story every ten minutes or so, but it’s the acting that really gets attention: Eric Portman and Dennis Price play killer and victim as if they’d just stepped out of an Oscar Wilde comedy, with civilized manners that border on savagery.

   Maxwell Reed and Hazel Court offer a nice counterpoint as innocent lovers caught up in all this, and the real standout is Greta Gynt as a disputed-wife-cum-femme-fatale.

   Writer Clowes and actress Gynt take a standard noir figure and create a portrait, not so much evil as sinfully self-indulgent: delightfully annoyed at a plot that interrupts her own pleasure, and rather fetchingly flattered by the notion that her husband would kill for her.

   A compelling turn in a film I recommend highly.

ROBERT GREER – The Devil’s Hatband. Frog Books, trade paperback, September 2004. Originally published by Mysterious Press, hardcover: March 1996; paperback: March 1997.

   CJ Floyd, a Denver African-American bail bondsman, is also a bounty hunter who goes after bondskippers, but the job he takes on in this first of a series is something quite different, the search for the missing daughter of a black federal judge.

   According to two men to who show up in CJ’s office, Brenda Mathison had joined the Grand River Tribe, a splinter group of what the two men call a “loony” environmental organization, PlanetFirst, then disappeared with a document that belonged to the men’s employer, Carson Technologies, a veterinary research organization.

   Something seems fishy to CJ, but with a sizable bonus promised if she’s found and the document returned within 30 days, he’s willing to take on the job.

   When CJ heads into the back country where Brenda was last known to be living, he finds that somebody else has already found her, a sheriff who’s discovered her body.

   As CJ continues his investigation of what has become an even more sensitive case, he learns that the Grand River Tribe is planning to destroy the Western cattle industry, and the connection with on Technologies involves a deadly virus that can wipe out not only a good portion of the cattle industry but untold numbers of people as well.

   This tense techno-thriller shifts back and forth between the search for the murderer or murderers of Brenda and an attempt to thwart the terrorist attack, CJ’s business in Denver, his ties to the black community, his uneasy alliance with the other bail bondsmen, and a threat posed by a local gangleader who has it in for him.

   CJ is also a collector, most notably of vintage license plates (hence, I suppose, the introduction by bookman and mystery writer Dunning for the Frog edition), and the narrative pace moves at times with gut-wrenching speed, then slows down for a more leisurely take on aspects of CJ’s life that have no direct connection with the Mathison case.

   CJ Floyd is one of the best-drawn and most interesting fictional characters I’ve come across recently, one that I hope to spend more time with in the future.

       The CJ Floyd series —

1. The Devil’s Hatband (1996)
2. The Devil’s Red Nickel (1997)

3. The Devil’s Backbone (1998)
4. Resurrecting Langston Blue (2005)

5. The Fourth Perspective (2006)
6. The Mongoose Deception (2007)

7. Blackbird, Farewell (2008)

R. D. [RODNEY] WINGFIELD – Frost at Christmas. PaperJacks, Canada, paperback original, 1984; 2nd printing, 1987. Constable, UK, hardcover, 1989. Bantam, US, pb, 1995.

   For a lover of detective stories I have to admit that I haven’t kept up with present day (or, at any rate, fairly recent) authors. This is not a plan, but a function of a slow reading rate and other things demanding attention.

   I have confessed several times to a close friend about not reading Wingfield, and he has always told me that I should. Of course I have watched and enjoyed all the episodes of the TV series but was aware that that series was not favoured by the author himself.

   I actually bought this paperback edition for 10 cents at Haslam’s bookstore in St Petersburg, Florida, on a visit in the early 1990s and finally I’ve read it.

   When the smoothly efficient Inspector Allen is taken ill, Frost has to take on the search for a missing 8-year-old girl, and his investigation keeps blundering into other cases, including a 32-year-old case of the murder of a bank worker and a missing £20.000.

   The story is told is short pithy passages and often from the viewpoint of Detective Constable Clive Barnard, the Chief Constable’s nephew who had been assigned to Denton C.I.D. for his first appointment and was accompanying Frost in his investigations.

   I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the book for a while and the first 100 pages shot by. After that, familiarity maybe set in for a while, but I still happily turned the pages, though without quite the same eagerness, until the end, 184 pages later. Still, overall it was an enjoyable read, and I will look out for a cheap copy of the second in the series, A Touch of Frost.

      The Detective Inspector Jack Edward Frost series —

    Frost at Christmas (1984)
    A Touch of Frost (1987)
    Night Frost (1992)
    Hard Frost (1995)
    Winter Frost (1999)
    A Killing Frost (2008)

   Commentary on books I’ve covered in the New York Times Book Review.   [Reprinted from The Armchair Detective, Vol. 1, No. 4, July 1968.]

    Previously on this blog:
Part 1 — Charlotte Armstrong through Jonathan Burke.
Part 2 — Victor Canning through Manning Coles.
Part 3 — Stephen Coulter through Thomas B. Dewey.

CHARLES DRUMMOND – Death at the Furlong Post. Walker, US, hardcover, 1968. Victor Gollancz, UK, hc, 1967. A couple of the most unstereotyped policemen (English) in mystery fiction are featured in this most promising of first novels. [Series character: One of the two policemen is Sergeant Bob Reed.]

FIELDEN FARRINGTON – A Little Game. Walker, US, hardcover, 1968. Popular Library, pb, 1969. Macmillan, UK, hc, 1968. TV movie: Universal, 1971 (Diane Baker, Ed Nelson, Howard Duff). A brooding, irresistibly suspenseful tale of black, ruthless malevolence peering out of the eyes of a 13 year old boy. [The first of two crime novels by this author.]

LUCILLE FLETCHER -The Girl in Cabin B54. Random House, US, hardcover, 1968. Dell, pb, 1969. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hc, 1969. A whale of a chiller about a transatlantic passenger whose extrasensory abilities reveal far too much about a previous occupant of her cabin.

NICHOLAS FREELING – Strike Out Where Not Applicable. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1968. Ballantine, pb, 1969; Penguin, pb, 1975. Victor Gollancz, UK, hc, 1967. Few but Freeling have the ability to turn a novel consisting largely of conversation into a fascinating reading experience. Here Inspector Van der Valk tackles a bludgeoning death in the small Dutch town of Lisse to which he’s been transferred.

WILLIAM GARNER – The Deep, Deep Freeze. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1968. Berkley, pb, 1969. Collins Crime Club, UK, hc, 1968. An absorbing and sure-handed blending of a host of diverse elements into a very satisfying novel of intrigue. [Series character: Michael Jagger.]

DICK LOCHTE – Sleeping Dog. Arbor House, hardcover, 1985. Paperback reprints: Warner, 1986; Poisoned Pen Press, trade pb, 2001.

   Dick Lochte’s Sleeping Dog, recently reprinted by Warner, features Serendipity Dahlquist and Leo G. Bloodworth, “a spunky little miss and case-hardened private shamus.”

   Serendipity is only fourteen, a 1980’s version of Holden Caulfield. When she and Leo find a corpse, she is blase, not queasy, saying, “I’ve seen dead people before, tons of ’em. On TV.”

   This unlikely team works together in a wild, fast-moving mystery about such unlikely subjects as dog-fighting and television. The Southern California scene, used so often in the past, has seldom been better portrayed, with an especially devastating picture of the ocean town, Playa del Rey.

   Equally good is Lochte’s picture of Bloodworth’s car: “It had dark tinted windows, the better to hide behind. Its back seat was covered with jackets, sweaters, strange hats, brown paper bags, squashed into balls, Big Mac wrappers, greasy fried chicken boxes, and empty beer cans. It was the car of a dedicated, working gumshoe.”

[UPDATE] 10-19-09.   Sleeping Dog won the Nero Wolfe Award and was nominated for an Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony Award when it came out in 1985. The only other novel-length appearance of this delightfully mismatched pair of detectives was Laughing Dog (Arbor House, 1988).

WILL MITCHELL – The Goldfish Murders. Gold Medal #188, paperback original; 1st printing, 1950. Red Seal, UK, pb, 1958.

   Somewhere along about chapter three of this Gold Medal original a character inquires about a sexy showgirl who has been found dead with a goldfish between her ‘lung worts.’ By then you should be well aware you are in the realm of Dan Turner Hollywood Detective more than Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer.

   The hero is NYPD Homicide sleuth Christopher Lash, the son of a legendary police officer with a penchant for quoting his old man. Chris has a tough case on his hands in a series of murders that mix Broadway and the funeral business and involves a series of corpses with that signature goldfish.

   Truth be told, Chris spends almost as much time romancing the screwball showgirl Penny as he does investigating the murder. Penny is the type who has a small dog named Cuspidor, and this is type of book where attractive young women have small dogs with names like Cuspidor who like to chew on visiting detectives’ pants cuffs.

   This one is less Mickey Spillane than Robert Leslie Bellem, but in a forgiving mood it adds up to some fun.

   A few samplings from the book will tell you more than any recitation of the plot ever could.

   If you have been wondering where the spicy pulps went to die, now you know. Still in its own way this is fun along the lines of Carter Brown, Bellem, or even some B movie mysteries. At least you get the impression Mitchell meant for it to be almost as funny as it is, and some points have to be given to any writer who gets away with comparing female anatomy to pouter pigeons.

   This seems to be Mitchell’s only book. But then one like this per career is all you really need.

   Should there be a third volume of Bill Pronzini’s paean to alternative classics Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, this one really has to be in consideration. They don’t get much more alternative than this.

NORA BARRY – Sherbourne’s Folly. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1978. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition. No paperback edition. No UK edition.

   The illness of an older sister calls a woman and her adopted daughter back to England from the American suburb where they now live. Once returned, as outsiders to the very much ingrown group of relatives and friends they’d left behind, they’re gradually become more and more aware that something sinister and evil is eating away beneath the strained welcome that greets them.

   In spite of the obvious Gothic trimmings, the accent on time, memory and the nostalgia for a vanished childhood makes this a refreshing change of pace from the hard-boiled violence, for example, of a tale told by a tough private eye. It’s a must as well for lovers of treasure hunts, mazes, and yes, even mansions with secret passages.

[UPDATE] 10-18-09. I read this review just moments ago for the first time in over 30 years, and from what I can tell, I enjoyed the book. I have to confess, however, that the comments above are all I remember about it. This also was the only mystery novel that Nora Barry wrote, either under that name or her real name, Diane Cleaver.

   Using Google — and how did we ever live without it? — I’ve found an online obituary for her here. Turns out that she was a well-known literary agent for most of her life, and that she was born in Birmingham, England, becoming a United States citizen in 1976.

   Which perhaps makes the book semi-biographical in nature, but that’s not a limb that I should be crawling out on, I’m sure. It sounds like a delightful story, though. If I could easily find my copy, I’d love to read it again.

SEE NO EVIL. Columbia Pictures, UK/US, 1971. British title: Blind Terror. Mia Farrow, Dorothy Alison, Robin Bailey, Diane Grayson, Brian Rawlinson, Norman Eshley, Paul Nicholas. Screenplay: Brian Clemens. Director: Richard Fleischer.

   Mia Farrow had already made Rosemary’s Baby (three years before) when she appeared in this movie, and even if she was 26 at the time, she could easily have passed for 16. Young, boyishly slim, ethereally beautiful, she might still have possessed a limited range as an actress, but no one could have doubted she was a movie star.

   And she’s the center of focus throughout this movie, recently blinded and forced to move in with her uncle, aunt and female cousin in their isolated English country mansion, she turns in a near tour de force of terror when a crazed killer leaves her unknowingly in a house full of blood and dead bodies.

   The emphasis is not on the killing, thankfully, but on her character’s reaction – I’ll take that back. It is the audience that is kept on the edge of their seats waiting for her to discover what they all know full well. Waiting and waiting, and then!

   Adjusting to becoming blind has to be one of the toughest tasks someone has to take on, and to be forced to undergo what Sarah does in her several mad dashes for escape, it is almost too much too bear. The killer is seen only from the waist down, in a series of low level shots not dissimilar to many seen in the definitive British TV spy series The Avengers, with which screenwriter Brian Clemens was long affiliated.

   Only the ending of See No Evil lets the viewer down, or at least this one, as Sarah is unaccountably left alone one last time, resulting in a fairly hair-raising one last encounter with the killer. All warning shouts to her boy friend, who’s just rescued her, go unheard. What a dummy!

[UPDATE] 10-19-09. Another movie with a similar theme is, of course, Wait Until Dark, 1967, with Audrey Hepburn as a young blind woman trapped in an apartment with a gang of hoodlums. I’ve been hoping someone else would mention it, as I haven’t seen it since it first came out, and I don’t remember any of the details — other than being scared to death for the heroine, who couldn’t see any of the dangers around her — but the audience could!

   Got a wild hair up my brain last month and started watching Othello: the 1965 film-of-the-play with Laurence Olivier, and the 1953 version done by Orson Welles, and now some    *** SPOILER COMMENTS ***

   I’m going to talk about the ending here because I assume most folks are familiar with it, or if you’re not, the full title, “The Tragedy of Othello” might tip you off.

   Olivier’s film is entirely too slow and stagy, especially the acting, which is rather too broad for a movie. The actors never seem to sit down and relax; they’re always standing (or posing, rather) to declaim their lines. Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi and Frank Finlay (who plays Iago like a mean-spirited Peter Cook) inject some naturalism, but they’re woefully overridden by Laurence Olivier, grimacing gesticulating, eye-rolling, and yet somehow compelling as ever.

   Then the 1949/53 Welles film: Visually splendid, and for a bespoke egotist, Welles is very generous to his supporting players, but the film itself has the kind of dubbing one normally associates with Japanese rubber-suit-monster-movies, so given the tricky mise-en-scene and the floating sound track, it’s sometimes hard to figure out who’s saying what. Surprisingly, in the whole cast, Robert Coote stands out as a deftly comic Roderigo, cast effectively against Micheal MacLiammoir, who plays Iago like a petulant Dudley Moore.

   MacLiammoir wrote a book about the chaotic production of this film, which took about a year-and-a-half to make and another year-and-a-half to get released. Put Money in Thy Purse (Methuen, 1952) is required reading for fans of Shakespeare and Welles, and a treat for those who just love good writing.

   MacLiammoir masters that subtle, self-deprecating humor one finds in the best of Walter Albert, and his evocations of the film’s exotic locations (Rome, Venice, Casablanca, Morocco…) are vivid and hilarious at the same time.

   He also has a clever way with his anecdotes, setting up a situation, milking it for potential, then delivering the punch line like a witty prize-fighter. There’s an exceptional scene of a drunken actor with a thick Dutch accent auditioning for Roderigo, who keeps getting drunker, more energetic and less comprehensible as the audition goes on for hours, at the end of which, Welles turns to MacLiammoir and says, “We may have been in the presence of genius. However, I think what the part calls for is talent.”

   The most effective film of the story, however, may be Franco Zeffirelli’s 1986 Otello, from Verdi’s opera, with great sets, costumes, and color, plus fast pace and snappy performances. The music ain’t bad either.

   Verdi gives a fine duet to Otello and Desdemona (which is more than Shakespeare did) and Zeffirelli caps off the ending with cathartic energy — which, I’m afraid, is also more than Shakespeare did; the Immortal Bard had a tendency sometimes let his plays keep going when the story was over. (And I wonder: did savvy Elizabethans slip out of the Globe right after Hamlet died or Juliet croaked, to avoid the rush in the parking lot?)

   If I mentioned Peter Cook and Dudley Moore earlier, it’s because Othello is largely an extended double-talk routine between Othello and Iago, gullible stooge and fast-talking con man: like a Hope-and-Crosby “Road to…” movie gone tragically wrong without the comic timing, or Oklahoma! if Poor Judd had actually hanged himself in the first act.

   The story ends with Iago found out but basically triumphant, and Othello, who would have been a more compelling character if he had any brains, little more than his patsy. Some fine writing, but the story is weak at its core and ultimately unsatisfying.

   And if I can throw in just one more aside, my favorite Othello isn’t a film at all, but a radio production with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson as Othello and Iago, and Judy Dench as Desdemona.

   Brutally edited but fast-moving, it gives the listener no time to get bored, and those who only know Gielgud from his “old prig” roles in the movies will find his Moor simply astonishing: he sounds fierce, black and seven feet tall, and he and Richardson play off each other like … well, like a well-practiced comedy team.