THE DARK HORSE. First National, 1932. Warren William, Bette Davis, Guy Kibbee. Vivienne Osborne, Frank McHugh, Sam Hardy, Berton Churchill, Harry Holman, Charles Sellon, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Robert Warwick, Louise Beavers, Wilfred Lucas Photography by Sol Polito; director: Alfred E. Green. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Guy Kibbee, the “dark horse” gubernatorial candidate of this political satire, is described by Warren William, his campaign manager, as “so dumb that every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.”

   Bette Davis is William’s secretary (and long-time girlfriend), who plays a nondescript role with her usual intelligence, but it’s Vivienne Osborne, as William’s predatory ex-wife, who steals the female acting honors as she lures Kibbee into a tryst, where in a game of strip poker he’s getting down to essentials as the police and reporters close in on their hideaway, with William flying in at the last minute in an attempt to get to the love nest ahead of them.

   Kibbee is a complete buffoon, completely innocent of anything that passes for intelligence, but he has a weak spot, an eye for a shady lady, and this pre-code film makes no bones about the unseemly nature of his relationship with Osborne.

   William is a human weasel, willing to do anything to promote his candidate, with Davis his conscience who rather belatedly manages to salvage William from the eager hands of the law. Kibbee is elected with William and Davis finally united and leaving the state to its new governor and a corrupt crew of supporters.

   I won’t be so crass as to suggest that this was selected as a less-than-discreet commentary on this year’s political slug-fest [2004], but astute observers will note some similarities with the contemporary scene. Sharp dialogue and frank treatment of the racy relationship of Kibbee and Osborne mark this as a pre-code script, and its quick footed pacing (and on the mark performances) made it a late-night favorite of the convention.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – Dark of the Moon.

Harper & Row, 1967. Paperback reprints: Berkley, February 1969; Carroll & Graf, 1987. UK edition: H. Hamilton, hc, 1968.

   John Dickson Carr was living in South Carolina when he died, so it is somewhat fitting that the last Gideon Fell mystery, Dark of the Moon, should be set in that state.

   A deviously plotted mystery, with its roots going back to the Civil War and even two centuries before, is only part of the attraction here. This is a book of many contrasts: ghosts are prominent, yet there is the fair play detection we expect from Carr.

   There is the spooky atmosphere of an old Southern mansion, and yet there is a hilarious baseball game, reminiscent of the time Carr/Dickson gave us Sir Henry Merrivale at bat in A Graveyard to Let.

   Finally, there is Fell, English to the core, having to function in hot weather in the US, after arriving in the South in his typical “shovel hat and a black cloak as big as a tent.”

ANDREW VACHSS – Haiku. Pantheon, hardcover. First Edition: November 2009.

   Haiku, for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, is a form or Japanese poetry consisting of three lines, and notable for its beauty, precision, and simplicity. It is also notable for one other thing that far too many western writers seem incapable of understanding. It doesn’t work very well in English.

   English language haiku tends to be pretentious, portentous, and empty. It misses almost entirely the thing that makes actual haiku haunting and viable. You probably can’t do limericks in Japanese. English haiku has the same problem, it neither scans nor fulfills artistically.

   Now, I’m sure there are some fans of English haiku out there, and some who even write it. I have no problem with that, but don’t fool yourself. It isn’t the same anymore than a 16th century Japanese writer could have written Shakespearean English.

   Some forms of writing are language centric. I’ve read that the remarkable thing about Omar Khayyam is that his quatrains read better in English than in the original Arabic — which is why he is a minor poet in his own language, but a major one in ours.

   Which could be a metaphor for Andrew Vachss’s latest novel. He tries to write in the voice of an Asian character foreign to these shores, and instead he sounds as if he ate some bad fortune cookies and watched too many episodes of Kung Fu.

   Far too many.

   Vachss is a good writer. Once in a while he is very close to a fine writer. While I am not a fan of his Burke books over all — for me they there is an element of exploitation to them — I recognize and applaud the white hot passion Vachss brings to his books, the almost Spillane-like conviction and power, but married to a more controlled and carefully crafted prose.

   In addition I will state flatly and offer no defense in saying I think his novel Two Trains Running, a stand-alone novel, is one of the best crime novels of the last thirty years, one of the best since Hammett’s The Glass Key. Find it, read it. Admire it. It is simply a fine crime novel that repays multiple readings.

   But skip Haiku unless you are a die-hard Vachss fan. And maybe even if you are.

   The incredibly contrived and strained plot of this short novel deals with a group of burned out street people who join together on an epic quest that will reveal and redeem them, if they survive it…

   Ho, the narrator, is a sensei seeking redemption, Michael is a gambling addict, Ranger a spaced out Vietnam vet, Lamont a street gang leader turned poet and burned out on alcohol, and Brewster an obsessive pulp collector who sets them all in motion when the deserted building where he hides his treasures is scheduled for destruction.

   Following a mysterious woman in a white Rolls Royce Michael conceives a plan to blackmail her if he can find her. He recruits the others to track her down and in the meanwhile they also find themselves seeking a new home for Brewster’s beloved collection.

   The plot practically drips with the foreshadowing of depth and importance. Metaphor hangs over it like big city smog.

   Unfortunately none of the people in the book are really characters — they are metaphors for Vachss message about community and heroes, and the nobility of man in even the most desperate of situations.

   All very admirable, but not very entertaining. On top of which he insists on telling us all this in Ho’s strained and false voice, rather than letting any of it develop from his plot or his character’s actions. Rather than trust his readers to get his point he drives every point in like a nail with a nail gun.

   Unsubtle writers really shouldn’t try for subtlety. Vachss is at his best when he is in your face, at his most subtle when he isn’t trying to be subtle at all. Here he seems to be trying to somehow hammer home subtly. As you can imagine that’s not very successful.

   Having a writer virtually shouting at you how important and deep his work is may not be the best strategy for entertainment. It’s not a particularly good one for art either. Art should speak for itself just as entertainment should. It’s never a good idea for your narrator to keep telling the reader how important what he is saying is.

   The problem isn’t the plot, or the characters. They aren’t far from the street people in many of Vachss’s well-drawn books. The problem is the incredibly heavy-handed second-hand Kung Fu narration of Ho, Vachss’s narrator.

   In Michael’s obsessed and possessed consciousness, there is no room for morality, He is capable of highly complex thoughts, but all his thinking is reserved for the computation of odds. He has been waiting for the one bet he can’t lose, that “mortal lock” for many years. With each passing season his connection to reality grows more frayed.

   214 pages of this is a lot to put up with. It’s like reading a novel length essay by a talented but unenlightened college sophomore who has just discovered Proust or Henry James. You appreciate his finer sensibilities, but you would give anything if he could write a simple declarative sentence.

   Mostly Haiku reads like a really pretentious and slightly self-referential graphic novel without pictures, or a really bad film script. You can almost hear the strained and overdone prose voice over long shots of mean streets. Unfortunately Haiku isn’t a graphic novel or a film, but an actual novel.

   Ironically the Batman novel Vachss wrote was considerably better written than this and a much better read.

   This is the kind of book where people have a “lupine grin” rather than a wolfish one, or a “palpable odor of fear” rather than the stench of fear. Ho seems determined to say everything in the most strained and pretentious voice imaginable.

   We would all have been better served if Vachss lost his Thesaurus. Vocabulary is not always a virtue in a writer’s toolbox. Words can get in the way as well as illuminate. In attempting Ho’s voice Vachss divorces himself from everything that gives his work its power and its strength.

   Ho removes Vachss from the street and the street people he writes so well about. It’s as if Raymond Chandler had tried to strain Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles through Christopher Marlowe’s voice. Ho is so noble and philosophical that he never takes on a human face despite the tragedy and guilt that drives his actions. If you can get past him you might enjoy this. I couldn’t.

   I suppose the business about saving Brewster’s library of pulps and paperbacks is supposed to have some deeper meaning about preserving our culture, and how popular literature sometimes speaks to a truer portrait of the real America than finer literary works, but all I could think was I would rather be reading any one of the books in Brewster’s collection than this.

   Vachss is a much better writer than this. But he is not an artist, he’s a storyteller. He is capable of telling moving and even important stories, but popular literature and literature are not the same thing, and that is not a put down. He is capable of drawing painfully sharp portraits of the streets and the people who haunt them. Even here when he gets away from Ho and his borrowed voice he once in a while taps into that — but not often enough to redeem the book.

   Why Vachss felt he had to write this I can only guess, and won’t speculate here. He had enough sense to keep it short though, and I suspect he must know this isn’t his best work.

   At one point he describes a character: “If anything he looked like a man standing in the shade of a tree who could not understand why this gave him no relief from the sun.” The reader can surely sympathize, wondering why this novel is giving him no entertainment and no relief from Ho’s strained narration.

   Vachss can write well, powerfully, but here he proves he can also overreach. It won’t hurt his reputation. His loyal and passionate fans will praise it, and he’ll go back to what he does so well with no harm done, save to readers who expect a certain level of competence and entertainment from his work.

   But unless you are one of those die hard fans give this one a pass. Rent the first season of Kung Fu on DVD instead. At least the overdone pseudo Taoism of Caine and his Master has the charm of a certain camp sensibility. Vachss is all too obviously sincere, which is a shame, because this same plot would have worked as a comic novel ala Donald Westlake or much of Elmore Leonard.

   God only knows, this one could use a few laughs.

   Skip this one and spend the money on his Two Trains Running, a book that really is a work of genuine art and skill, a top flight crime writer at the very height of his ability and craft. That’s the real McCoy. That’s Vachss at his best and most representative.

   Listening to Ho’s false and pretentious voice isn’t a good deal more comfortable than being cornered by an actual street person. Instead of pity and compassion, all you feel is the need to escape. Luckily that can be done by simply closing the book. Or not picking it up in the first place.

THE APE. Monogram, 1940. Boris Karloff, Maris Wrixon, Gene O’Donnell, Dorothy Vaughan, Gertrude Hoffman, Henry Hall. Based on a play by Adam Shirk, adapted by Curt Siodmak. Screenwriters: Siodmak and Robert Carroll. Director: William Nigh.

   This low-budget horror film was among those shown on TCM as part of a day-long festival of Boris Karloff movies just before Halloween.

   In David Vineyard’s rundown of the list of titles (see the comments following), he gave rather short shrift to this one, and I’m sure rightfully so.

   It’s short on thrills, imagination and budget, not necessarily in that order, but the presence of Mr. Karloff in it makes it worth a look-see, as it almost always does.

   He plays one of his patented, well-recognized characters in this one, the more than slightly befuddled Dr. Bernard Adrian, whose dream is find a cure for polio in his backroom laboratory, first for crippled Frances Clifford (Maris Wrixon), who lives only a short distance away, and then for all mankind.

   He’s a kindly old man, rather feeble-looking, but slightly scary with that glaring intensity that’s always in his eyes – the sort of old man whose house small kids dare each other to throw rocks at, which they do.

   To obtain the serum for Miss Clifford’s recovery – well, that’s where the escaped ape from a circus traveling nearby comes in. Dr. Adrian finds he needs what seem to be spinal taps from dead men to continue his work, and somehow it appears that he has the ape doing his stealthy, late-at-night tasks for him.

   Here are the key words in the review so far: befuddled, kindly, scary, intensity, stealthy. Without Boris Karloff in this movie, you could also call it ludicrous. But with him in it, it’s transformed into another dimension altogether.

   It’s still not a very good movie, but I think there are parts of it, if I can convince you to watch it, that you may not forget — and no, I don’t mean the scary parts.

THE MAN WITH THE CLOAK. MGM, 1951. Joseph Cotten, Barbara Stanwyck, Louis Calhern, Leslie Caron, Joe De Santis, Jim Backus, Margaret Wycherly. Based on the story “The Gentleman from Paris,” by John Dickson Carr. Director: Fletcher Markle.

   When I watched this movie late last month, it had to have been for the first time in over 50 years, probably back then as a film on late-night TV. I had good memories of it, and even though I discovered that I’d completely forgotten the basics of the plot line, the memories I had held up fairly well — surprisingly so, in fact.

   What I remembered most: Joseph Cotten as a shabbily elegant, almost perfect player of a dissolute poet in Manhattan who befriends a young girl from Paris (Leslie Caron) with a letter from her fiancé to his uncle, whom she’s come to visit. Cotten goes by the name of Dupin in the movie, but we all know better, don’t we? Back in the late 1950s, I’m not so sure I did!

   The uncle (an aged Louis Calhern) is almost as close a friend to drink as Dupin, even though he knows it will kill him.

   He is equally suspicious of his three servants, primarily Lorna Bounty, his housekeeper (Barbara Stanwyck), a faded beauty whose eyes simply glitter with anger and resentment when she sees the prize for which she’s worked so long (his money) for about to be whisked away by this bravely innocent chit of a girl (another fine performance).

   I thought (this time) the setting fine, the dialogue most excellent and the pace slow, but not so much so as to be annoying.

   The bit about Dupin finding a missing will (from the actions of a dying man unable to speak or move more than his head) I found not as satisfying as I might have at an earlier age. I may have to read the story again to see if the movie people improved upon it, or the contrary. I suspect the latter.

● La chute de la maison Usher. [The Fall of the House of Usher.] Films Jean Epstein, 1928. Silent. Jean Debucourt, Marguerite Gance, Charles Lamy, Fournez-Goffard, Luc Dartagnan. Based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe; adaptation by Luis Buñuel. Screenwriter-director: Jean Epstein.

● The Fall of the House of Usher. G.I.B., 1949. Gwen Watford, Kay Tendeter, Irving Steen, Vernon Charles. Based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe. Director: Ivan Barnett.

● The Queen of Spades. Associated British Picture Corp., 1949. Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans, Yvonne Mitchell, Ronald Howard, Mary Jerrold. Based on the short story by Alexander Pushkin. Director: Thorold Dickinson.

   After The Phantom of the Opera [reviewed here ] I followed up with two versions of The Fall of the House of Usher: first, a French silent film from 1928 by Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel (whom I hold responsible for frequent meaningless cutsaway to shots of frogs enjoying a night of passion) and secondly, the British quota quickie from 1949.

   I recommend both films to viewers who can enjoy a creepy mood for its own sake, and ignore some (well, a lot… make that an awful lot of) narrative deficiencies. The ’49 film in particular suffers from a bad script, dreadful acting and low budget, but it conveys such a sense of absolute horror that I find myself shuddering, even after repeated viewings.

   The Queen of Spades, made the same year, in the same country as the second House, is in fact its polar opposite: lavishly produced and directed, brilliantly written and acted, it’s a film I can recommend to anyone who loves a fine, gothic chiller, with ghosts, obsession and satanic bargains.

   And it also has a used bookstore.

      

BILL CRIDER – Murder in Four Parts. St. Martin’s, hardcover; First edition: February 2009.

    In his sixteenth adventure, Sheriff Dan Rhodes finds himself getting recruited into the Clearview (Texas) Community Barbershop Chorus. The group can’t be called a “quartet” because it has more than four members.

    But they do specialize in traditional “barbershop” music sung in four-part harmonies. And the chorus quickly finds its numbers diminishing when the chorus director is found beaten to death in his floral shop.

    As usual, Sheriff Rhodes is up to his eyebrows in problems: the murder of florist and chorus director Lloyd Berry; controversy over whether citizens should be permitted to keep chickens in their back yards within Clearview city limits; a turf war between two dumpster-divers; trouble at the local legal-gambling establishment; and (in true Crider spirit) an alligator loose in a drainage ditch.

    The dialogue is often laugh-out-loud funny while unpretentiously realistic. The characters are at once slapstick, while at the same time people that we all know. There’s math professor C.P. Benton, a perpetual braggart and a folksinger who claims skills in anything from the martial arts to computer security, and who has his eye on the female deputy.

    There’s music store owner Max Schwartz, who has branched out into the restaurant trade, but can’t decide whether to spell out “barbecue” or write it as “BBQ.” There’s Tom Fulton, owner of a store specializing in GPS receivers (“Tom’s Tomtoms”) who has a GPS joke for every occasion.

    And of course there is Lawton, the Blacklin County jailer, and Hack Jenson, the county police dispatcher, who carry on like Abbott and Costello.

    Murder in Four Parts leads Sheriff Rhodes through more twists and turns than a country lane with a plot that seems to tie together gambling, embezzlement, geocaching, and waste disposal, and ends with a daring chase that takes Rhodes through a dark and muddy mesquite field and atop a moving train.

    As with all of Crider’s books, this is a delight. By the end you’re likely to be humming harmonies to “Shine on Me” and “The Old Mill Stream.” A melodic masterpiece.

MATTHEW PEARL – The Last Dickens. Random House, hardcover, March 2009; trade paperback, October 2009.

   Matthew Pearl has continued his excursions into nineteenth-century historical fiction begun with The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow with The Last Dickens — a meticulously researched account of events, both real and imagined, that follow upon the sudden death of author Charles Dickens, with only six episodes of his detective novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, completed.

   J. T. Fields, senior partner in the firm of Fields, Osgood & Co., Dickens’ American publishers, on the slender hope that a completed manuscript might exist, dispatches his energetic junior partner, James R. Osgood, accompanied by Rebecca Sands, the company’s bookkeeper, to England, where they pursue their quest with increasing urgency, and danger to themselves.

   The novel spans several years (from 1867, the year of Dickens’ last American visit, to 1870, the year of the writer’s death), and three continents. The novel begins in India, with its harvesting of opium under British supervision for an international market, providing what appears to be a diversion from the main trajectory of the novel.

   Then, as the suspense mounts in the pursuit of the elusive and possibly non-existent manuscript, leading Osgood into the opium dens of London, the implications of the events in far-off India become all too clear.

   Anyone who thinks that modern drug trafficking, with its attendant horrors, is a recent phenomenon, will be astonished at its prevalence in the 19th century. Sherlock Holmes’ “eccentric” drug usage had significant contemporary relevance, and the poppy fields of India are the backdrop against which the events of the novel play out

   There are elements that seem fanciful, such as the stalking of Dickens by a deranged Boston female fan (for which, in fact, there is some historical evidence), but the novel easily sheds the manufactured air that can beset historical novels.

   The often bloody wars between rival publishing houses, in a era when America offered no copyright protection for foreign writers, are vividly presented, with the rivalry between Fields and Harper generating much of the dramatic heat of the novel. But if the plot is intricately (and cleverly) laid out, the characters are never subservient to it.

   Finally, I read Pearl’s notes on his sources for the novel with as much interest as I did the novel itself. They answered many of the questions I might have raised about the authenticity of the narrative, with an imaginary dialogue between Pearl and James Osgood a particular delight.

   For me, the dialogue highlighted Matthew Pearl’s ability to create a sense of immediacy that bridges the temporal gap between the 19th and 21st centuries. This may be historical fiction, but it’s history that’s brought to vivid life by the author.

   
CLEVE F. ADAMS – Shady Lady. Ace Double D-115, paperback original, 1955. [Paired back-to-back with One Got Away, by Harry Whittington.]

   Adams is one of mystery fiction’s shadow figures. Born in 1895, he began selling to pulp mystery magazines in the mid-1930s, broke into hardcover novels at the end of the decade, and wrote most of his novels in a burst of creativity (and of recycling earlier pulp tales) during World War II. In these respects, his career paralleled that of Raymond Chandler.

   But unlike Chandler, Adams is today largely forgotten, even though he forged his own distinctive image of the private detective.

    The Adams eye is a sort of prose incarnation of Humphrey Bogart that predates Bogey’s movie detectives, but with more stress on the brutality and cynicism and less on the sentimental heart. He has a capacity for long, brooding silences, sudden ribald laughter, mad fury, and aloof arrogance. His features are wolfish and satanic and he often slaps women around during his maniacal fits of rage.

   He’s a racist, a fascist, and a hypocrite, but a tender ballad brings tears to his eyes. In one word, he’s an oaf, deliberately drawn by Adams so as to pull the rug out from under Chandler’s romantic image of the PI as a contemporary knight.

   Most of Adams’s novels depend on a stock company of recurring characters, mannerisms, scenes, plot elements, even tag lines of description and dialogue. He was an expert at borrowing story lines from Dashiell Hammett, rewriting Red Harvest three times and The Glass Key twice.

   But even when he coasted on the most familiar gambits in hard-boiled literature, he showed a genius for juggling diverse groups of shady characters, each with his or her own greedy objective.

   Right after Christmas 1949, Adams died of a heart attack. His pulp writer buddies Robert Leslie Bellem and W.T. Ballard helped out his widow by finishing his last novel. One version, entitled “Too Fair to Die,” appeared in the March 1951 issue of Two Complete Detective Books magazine, and four years later Ace Books published a more polished draft as the paperback original Shady Lady.

   It turned out to be the finest work of Adams’s career.

   Like many of his earlier novels, among the best of which are Sabotage (1940), Decoy (1941), and Up Jumped the Devil (1943), Shady Lady stars a shamus named Rex McBride.

   In this adventure he trails a missing embezzler’s girlfriend from Los Angeles to the mining metropolis of Copper Hill, Montana, arriving just in time to become involved in a vicious gubernatorial primary, a love affair with two sisters, and a string of murders.

   The plot is plagued with loose ends like many Adams efforts, but the book is so overflowingly rich in character sketches and powerful understated scenes that one is compelled to believe either that Bellem and Ballard contributed huge amounts to the manuscript or that, had he lived longer, Adams might have developed into a talent of near-Chandleresque dimensions. The electoral contest provides a marvelous setting for Adams’s ghoulish cynicism about American politics.

   In his seminal essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler argued that the PI novel requires a knightly hero to redeem the corrupt milieu. Adams disagreed violently, and in his world the protagonist is not a hero and no less corrupt than anyone else, just tougher and luckier. Repulsive the Adams eye may be, but he’s frighteningly hard to forget.

         ———
   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.

JAMES ANDERSON – Assault and Matrimony.

Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1981. UK edition: Frederick Muller Ltd., hc, 1980. TV movie: NBC, 1987 (with Jill Eikenberry & Michael Tucker).

   On the surface, Sylvia and Edgar Chambers have a marriage that is too good to be true. In fact, it isn’t. Unknown to either, each hates the other with a passion, and it takes only a nudge to send them both completely over the edge.

   The comedy of errors that quickly follows is deeply tinged in black. Each of these two basically unlikeable people tries in fierce desperation to kill the other — and any innocent bystanders who happen to be wandering by — and yet neither of them quite manages to succeed.

   There is not an ounce of conscience between them. It would not be at all difficult for the easily disillusioned reader to become completely exasperated with both of them, giving up with disgust at the seemingly endless variety of their elaborately structured plots.

   Fortunately, the ending is even more clever and complex, surpassing anything either of them has come up with before then. It’s a challenge, but it’s also well worth the wait.

[UPDATE] 11-03-09. I still have the book but not the patience to find out which of many, many boxes in the basement it could possibly be in. It’s a shame, too, as the ending (as I’ve described it) intrigues me. Do I remember it? In a word, no, I don’t. (That’s a heck of a thing, isn’t it?)

   James Anderson, a British author, made a specialty in his early career of writing books whose titles begin with the letter “A” (The Alpha List, Angel of Death, Appearance of Evil, Assassin and so on).

   Later on he wrote three well-regarded detective mysteries taking place in the 1930s and solved by Inspector Wilkins (e.g., The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg-Cosy) and three Murder, She Wrote novelizations (with Jessica Fletcher).

[UPDATE #2.] 11-11-09. Thanks to Jamie Sturgeon for sending me the cover image at the top of this review. It’s from the Muller edition, not the Crime Club edition I own but which remains unseen for anyone for almost 30 years, including me.