LIFE BEGINS AT FORTY. Fox, 1934. Will Rogers, Rochelle Hudson, George Barbier, Richard Cromwell, Jane Darwell, Slim Summerville, Sterling Holloway. Screenplay by Lamar Trotti, adapted from the novel by Walter B. Pitkin. Director: George Marshall. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Rogers was probably closer to 50 than 40 when he played Kenesaw H. Clark, a small-town newspaperman who loses his paper to banker George Barbier who calls in a loan after Rogers hires recently released convict Richard Cromwell, who had been convicted of stealing funds from Barbier’s bank.

   This is one of Rogers’ patented do-good roles as his rehabilitation of Cromwell includes proving he was framed for the theft and putting up lazy Slim Summville as an opposition candidate to Barbier in the upcoming school board election.

   Sterling Holloway plays dangerously close to a dead-on Caucasian Stepin Fetchit impersonation, with Hudson the schoolteacher who falls for Cromwell, and Darwell, greatness still ahead of her, doing her folksy (and very effective) maiden lady who may have an eye for perennial bachelor Rogers.

   The film’s portrayal of small-town America introduces some elements that almost veer into crime drama and an attempted lynching of Cromwell that casts an ugly shadow on this family comedy/drama.

   Rogers propelled these evocations of period America into box-office successes that may seem liked faded snapshots to some, but their genuine humor, warmth, and basic dramatic conflicts still have the power to engage and entertain.

DEAN OWEN – Juice Town.   Monarch 290; paperback original; first printing, December 1962. Cover art by Rafael M. deSoto.

   Over the years that he was writing, Dean Owen (born Dudley Dean McGaughey, 1909-1986) was perhaps better recognized for his westerns than for his crime fiction, but at the present time I doubt that he’s a well-known name in either field — except to regular readers of this blog, of course.

   If you follow the link that follows, though, you’ll find a fairly lengthy and what I hope is a complete checklist of all the fiction he wrote, starting out in the pulps, then moving on to writing paperback originals almost exclusively.

   Of the books already listed in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, I’ve found two errors. First of all, Juice Town is listed as only a marginal entry. Not so, as you will see in a minute. And A Killer’s Bargain (Hillman, pbo, 1960) is included, and I don’t believe it should be. From all I can tell without having it in hand, it’s a western, with no more crime elements than almost any other western has.

   And of the “sleaze” books Dean wrote, some may have definite crime elements, but while they’re included in the checklist, I don’t own any of them, so someone else will have to report in on those. (And in fact, two of the hard-to-find digests Owen wrote as Hodge Evens have since been confirmed as having substantial crime content.)

   It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book like this one. It starts out really, really tough and doesn’t let up until it’s over. It doesn’t matter too much if it’s also only a song with only one note. The one note is like a small incessant drumming in the background that just doesn’t go away until the book is finished.

   In a sense (speaking of westerns) this is a western in theme, at least, if not in reality. One guy in a white hat comes to town and cleans it up, one guy against the mob, one guy who’s left himself vulnerable with a wife and kids, but he does his job anyway.

   The guy in this book is Del Painter. Out of a job and looking for work – there’s a story behind that as well – he is persuaded to return to his home town of Southbay, California, and to join the same police department that he was so proud his Uncle Ray, now deceased, was a member of for so long.

   Little does Del know that his uncle was a crook, that the entire police department is crooked (and rather openly so), and that he on his first day on the job is expected to be a crook as well. Juice, in the sense of the title, means protection, as it is carefully explained to Del on page 34, and the police in Southbay make out very well, including the use of the services of the local ladies of the evening whenever they feel they have a need for them.

   Del has a hard head, though, and hard heads make for harder enemies in towns like this. He does make a few friends, however, although it difficult to tell at times – well, most of the time – on which side some of the friends are.

   Only 144 pages long, this book can be read in only one evening, and probably in only one sitting.

   And even though several weeks later you are probably not very likely to remember much of the details of what is admittedly a rather minor effort, this vividly jagged portrayal of a town with such a blatant disregard of the law may stick with you a whole lot longer than you think it will, when you’re done with it.

CARTER BROWN – Lament for a Lousy Lover. Signet S1856, paperback original; 1st printing, 1960 [Baryé cover art]. Third printing: Signet D3162 [Robert McGinnis cover]. Also published in Carter Brown Long Story Magazine #19, Australia, Horwitz, 1961.

   The Australian writer Alan G. Yates, a veritable one-man paperback factory, has turned out hundreds of lightweight private-eye and police novels under the Carter Brown pseudonym. The books borrow liberally from the old Spicy Detective pulp formula: action, wisecracks, coarse humor, plenty of voluptuous un- and underdressed sexpots.

   This one is a bit unusual in that it features two of Brown’s regular series characters in one book: Al Wheeler, the skirt-chasing Pine City sheriff’s detective; and Mavis Seidlitz, an astonishingly endowed and astoundingly dizzy blonde who somehow manages to fmd work as a private eye.

   Their historic meeting was prompted by a suggestion from Anthony Boucher, the only mystery critic of consequence to regularly review Brown’s paperbacks.

   As is the case with many of Brown’s books, the background is Hollywood. Mavis is on location for the filming of a hit TV western series, hired to keep a couple of feuding starlets apart. The star is murdered (via the ancient wheeze of substituting live bullets for blanks), and Wheeler is assigned to the case.

   Everybody has a likely motive; another murder ensues; Mavis blunders around like an idiot; Wheeler lusts after the starlets and winds up with Mavis. The first-person narrative alternates between Wheeler and Mavis (Yates/Brown deserves extra credit for successfully managing to provide this burlesque caricature with a semi-plausible character voice).

   Among the dozens of other Al Wheeler novels are The Brazen (1960), Burden of Guilt (1970), and Wheeler Fortune (1974). Mavis Seidlitz also stars in None but the Lethal Heart (1959) and Tomorrow Is Murder (1960).

   Brown’s other series characters include L.A. private eye Rick Holman; Randy Roberts, a randy San Francisco lawyer; and Hollywood scriptwriter Larry Baker and his drunken partner, Boris Slivka.

         ———
   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: Other Carter Brown novels reviewed on this blog —

      Meet Murder, My Angel, by Geoff Bradley.

      The Deadly Kitten, by Stephen Mertz.

      Plus Toni Johnson-Woods on the CARTER BROWN MYSTERY THEATRE.

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS. Orion Pictures, 1986. Patsy Kensit, Eddie O’Connell, David Bowie, James Fox, Ray Davies, Mandy Rice-Davies, Sade Adu. Based on the novel by Colin MacInnes. Original music: Gil Evans; cinematography by Oliver Stapleton. Director: Julien Temple.

   For me, this knockout of a movie musical was an absolute eye-opener. A veritable feast for the eyes and ears throughout, beginning with the opening narration by Colin (Eddie O’Connell):

   It is as if the war and the postwar recovery were over at last, and the world changed in a magical instant from black-and-white to vivid color. It is the summer of the teen-ager, brought to life and personified by Colin the photographer, and Suzette (Patsy Kensit) the model. Youth and young love and … money. Bright lights and glitter are always followed by trouble. No roads are ever easy, and there are always obstacles along the way.

   Success comes to Suzette first, and boy loses girl. Does that sum it up? Does boy win girl back? Don’t always be so sure.

   Beautifully photographed throughout, with the best of late 50s London pop and rock, as seen through the visual lens of 1986. If David Bowie and Ray Davies (of The Kinks) do not play your kind of music, as they do mine, this may not be the movie for you, but the flash and brilliant color may win you back.

   From the first sequence on, a melange of activity in a busy, thriving section of streets in a boisterous entertainment area in London, over two minutes long in one continuing shot filled with what looks like hundreds of musicians and dancers, I was caught up immediately. This is my kind of musical.

   Colin again:   “For the first time ever, kids were teenagers. They had loot, however come by and loot’s for spending. Where there’s loot, trouble follows.”

   Can you say “sell out”?

   And worse. The ending, incorporating as it does hints of class warfare (well, more than hints) and a well-choreographed racial riot that I’d have made several minutes shorter, but it is one of the four crucial parts of the book this film was based on, the events of which take place on four days in London — one a month — over an 18-year-old boy’s last summer as a teenager.

   Even so, some reviewers have said that this movie misses the whole point of the book, which I haven’t read, but I have a feeling they may be right, that any message the film may have intended is lost among the magnificent colors, vivid imagery, and above all, the music. An overload, in fact, but truthfully? I didn’t mind it for a second.

PETER CARTER BROWN – Meet Murder, My Angel. Horwitz-Transport, Australia, paperback, 1956.

   I’ve written before that one of my guilty pleasures is the Al Wheeler books of Carter Brown. Back in the 1950s and early ’60s, when I was an impressionable teenager, I read a lot of Brown in those large but thin Horwitz paperbacks.

   I found them to be fast, breezy and humorous reads and those few I’ve read in later days have been similarly entertaining.

   I saw this 1954 production — when Carter Brown was still Peter Carter Brown on the spine and title page, though he had morphed to just Carter Brown on the front cover — in a second hand bookshop and, though it was rather tatty, it was cheap and I couldn’t resist it.

   More fool me. When I got it home and started on it I expected a couple of hours of brisk humour but what I got was absolute rubbish. The story, narrated by Californian attorney Mike Stone, involves hidden treasures, old gangsters and beautiful women but is absolute tosh. Worse, it isn’t in the slightest bit funny.

EDITORIAL COMMENTS. I think it confirms Geoff’s judgment on this book to point out that unless it came out under a different title, this book was never published in either England or the US. It’s also a scarce book. There are no copies for sale anywhere on the Internet.

   Luckily Geoff kept the one he reviewed — I wasn’t sure after I read the his comments about the book! — so that’s the one you see up above. He adds: “The book is number 23 in the Horwitz series, and I believe it’s an Australian edition though the copyright page lists distribution agents for the UK, Ireland and Europe. The cover also has 2/- which is two shillings (or was in 1956).”

OLIVER BLEECK – The Brass Go-Between. William Morrow, hardcover, 1969. Paperback reprints include: Pocket, 1971; Perennial Library 1983,1987.

   Ross Thomas uses the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck for his entertaining Philip St. Ives books. These are fast-paced stories with first-person narration, reminiscent of many private-detective novels.

   But St. Ives is not a detective, he is a professional go-between — that is, he acts as an intermediary between such parties as kidnappers and the kidnap victim’s family, insurance companies and thieves, etc. He has built a reputation in this strange profession and people on both sides of the law seem to trust him.

   In The Brass Go-Between, the first book of the series, he is dealing with the Coulter Museum in Washington, D.C., attempting to recover a huge brass shield that has been stolen from the museum’s Pan-African collection.

   But there is more to the shield than meets the eye. Not only is it historically priceless, it is also a magnificent work of art. Add to this the fact that at least two opposing African nations claim rightful ownership and it becomes obvious many people would like to discover the whereabouts of the shield.

   Naturally, all this complicates St. Ives’s job as he encounters many of the interested parties along the way: Winfield Spencer, a rich and reclusive art collector; and Conception Mbwato, a giant emissary from the African nation of Komporeen, to name but two.

   This and the other Oliver Bleeck titles — Protocol for a Kidnapping (1971), The Procane Chronicle (1972), The Highbinders (1974), and No Questions Asked (1976) — are distinguished for their crisp dialogue, unusual backgrounds, and understated sense of irony. Qualities, of course, that Thomas also infuses into his novels published 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.

OLIVER BLEECK – Protocol for a Kidnapping.

Pocket, reprint paperback; 1st printing, June 1972. Hardcover edition: William Morrow, 1971. Later paperback: Perennial P646, 1983.

   Bleeck, as I’m sure you know, was the occasional pen-name of well-regarded thriller writer, Ross Thomas, whose five Bleeck novels all featured Philip St. Ives, by career a professional go-between, if you will. This is the second of them. (The first in the series, as a matter of fact, was The Brass Go-Between, 1969.)

   As a personal aside, the reason I know Thomas is well-regarded is because I once ventured the statement that I personally found his books less than always wonderful, and I was ragged on something fierce about this by several vociferous dissenters.

   Ah, well. So maybe I was wrong. Try again? Sure, and so here we are. Here’s my revised opinion. Thomas (as Bleeck) is good at describing atmosphere and setting — no make that better than good — and even better at creating characters. People who easily step off the page into your living room.

   But, and you know there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you? I didn’t think his plot held any more water than a bucketful of holes, and I didn’t think the mixture of lightness (if not humor) and the (for lack of a better work) bleakness at the end went together any better than milk and beer do, or ever did.

   The situation that St. Ives is called in on is that of a supposedly kidnapped American ambassador to Yugoslavia, in return for a imprisoned poet and his spectacularly beautiful granddaughter, and St. Ives’ expertise in similar criminal circumstances.

   The word ‘supposedly’ is correct, and I’m not revealing anything the reader doesn’t know by page 30, but I’ll issue a **PLOT ALERT** warning anyway, and say that there is some funny business going one and it’s all some kind of setup for what seems to be awfully far-fetched reasons, or at least in terms of why go to such lengths for such a small gain. **END PLOT ALERT**

   St. Ives’ two travelling companions, the fun-loving and seemingly carefree Winston and Knight — who reminded me of none other than Tommy Hambledon’s two associates, one of whose names was Campbell and I think I need some help with the other one — seem, as I say, to take it all as a lark, and so I did too.

   Until, that is, the body count started to stack up. I will have to read Manning Coles again. I am sure people died in his (their) books, but why do I remember the lightheartedness of the books, and not the bodies?

   I mentioned the granddaughter. There is another beautiful woman in the book — I almost said babe, but I refrained — Arrie Tonzi, an escort sent by the embassy to meet St. Ives and his party in Belgrade.

   Philip St. Ives does indeed like girls, as we soon discover, and I am sure Tommy Hambledon did also, but Manning Coles was, shall we say, of an earlier era, and we can only surmise.

   As long as I’m quoting, let me do a long one. I am impressed by Thomas’ way with words. From pages 73-74, when St. Ives and party first meet the granddaughter:

   I really wish I could write like that, and I really wish the plot had made more sense. Maybe I’ll read the book again. I really liked the good parts.

[UPDATE] 10-01-09. When I wrote the review I knew exactly what it was that didn’t work in terms of the plot, but I have to tell you, reading through this review again now, over six years later, I certainly don’t now. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the story has as many holes in it as I said I did.

   Do you trust me on this? I know I do, but then again, I have to live with myself.

WILLIAM P. McGIVERN – Very Cold for May. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1950. Reprint paperback: Pocket 786, April 1951. Trade paperback: Penguin, March 1987.

   Punny titles are among the earmarks of writers who got their start at the pulps, as did William P. McGivern, and his Very Cold for May is an example, once we learn that the name of the corpse is May Laval.

   The setting is McGivern’s home town, Chicago. (He would later in his career write primarily of Philadelphia, New York, and California.) May had been planning to publish a “tell-all” diary, and public relations expert Jake Harrison is hired to protect his friend Dan Riordan.

   When May’s lips and pen are permanently sealed, he turns detective to protect himself as well as his friend.

   If this book isn’t McGivern at his peak (as he is in Odds Against Tomorrow and The Big Heat), it is nonetheless a lively, tightly plotted book, and Penguin deserves thanks for reprinting it in their new Classic Crime series.

ALVIN KARPIS & BILL TRENT – Public Enemy Number One. McClelland & Stewart, Canada, hardcover, 1971; Coward McCann & Geoghegan, US, hc, 1971, as The Alvin Karpis Story. Paperback reprint: Berkley, 1972.

   While authors like Raymond Chandler were practicing violent crime in the pulps, other folks were doing it in real life, as witness this book by Alvin Karpis and Bill Trent. For those who may not remember, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis was one of the most notorious of the rural bank robbers roaming the mid-west from 1931 to 1935,and in a roster that induded John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd, “Creepy” Karpis was, one of the sharpest and most successful.

   He was also the only one to survive and write (or ghost-write) his memoirs, and I have to say he and Bill Trent make a good job of it. Karpis/Trent can detail a bank robbery and car chase with the staccato skill of Richard Stark or Dan J. Marlowe, and he avoids any tendency to glamorize or mitigate his crime; in this narrative, he’s just a professional thief, doing what he does well.

   Karpis also avoids writing anything that might jump up and bite him in the ass. He and his gang were responsible for a goodly number of deliberate murders and incidental killings, but Karpis doesn’t talk about any of them. When he does go into detail about a killing, he usually ascribes it to someone else (usually “Doc” Barker) though Karpis seems to remember a whole lot of incidental details for a guy who wasn’t there at the time.

   Just as much fun as the gory details, though, is Karpis’ gently cynical view of life, crime and law enforcement.

   He makes no excuses for himself, and builds no illusions about his co-workers. Bonnie and Clyde he describes as being mentally sub-normal, and though “Ma” Barker was generally depicted in those days as a criminal mastermind who spawned and directed a gang of killers, according to Karpis, “She couldn’t organize breakfast. She knew where we were getting the money, she knew what we did, but whenever we sat down to plan a job, we sent her out to the movies.”

   I also got a kick out of Karpis’ description of his arrest by J. Edgar Hoover — the only major collar Hoover ever made personally, and according to Karpis, something of a comic opera. Public Enemy is less critical of Hoover than later books would be, but somehow the bankrobber’s casual dismissal of him as a political hack is even more damning than some of the full-blown indictments that followed. It’s as if a real man of action just had no time for a power-hungry poseur like Hoover.

JAMES ELLROY – Blood’s a Rover. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, September 2009.

   James Ellroy has long been the mad bad devil dog of crime fiction, and beginning with American Tabloid then The Cold Six Thousand, the first two books of the “Underworld USA” trilogy, he made a political move toward a sort of crackpot history of all the paranoid secret conspiracy theories of the twentieth century from the days of Bugsey Siegel in Vegas to the Kennedy election and assassination on.

   In his latest novel, Blood’s a Rover (the title is from a poem by A.E. Houseman) he has settled on perhaps the most tumultuous period in American history since the Civil War, the period from the assassination of Martin Luther King to the death of J. Edgar Hoover on the eve of Watergate, 1968 to 1972.

   This isn’t to suggest Ellroy has forgotten his roots in the mystery and crime genre. The book opens with a splendidly choreographed armored car robbery in a black neighborhood in Los Angeles. It is a perfectly done scene that deserves to be filmed.

   Blood’s a Rover turns on three characters and their relation to a fourth, a beautiful and legendary radical American woman, Joan Rosen Klein, aka Red Joan. The three men are Dwight Holly, J. Edgar Hoover’s personal gunman, who knows all the secrets of his secret-ridden boss and some of his own, and who may be damned by his growing humanity, thanks to his growing love for one of his informants; Wayne Tedrow, who murdered his own father, who had been part of Hoover’s operation Black Rabbit to disgrace and finally kill Martin Luther King, and who now finds as he moves to building a casino empire in the Dominican Republic that his politics are growing more radical; and Don “Crutch” Crutchfield, a young LA private eye, once Joan’s lover, and on the cutting edge of the right wing reactionaries and the left wing crazies who populate the story.

   These three will be thrown into a dizzying world of violence and conspiracy tying together a brutal and bloody armored car robbery; Hoover’s plans for Operation Baaad Brother aimed at creating then cracking down on black radicals; the 1968 Presidential election, and the Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention; Sal Mineo, the Oscar-nominated actor fallen to the level of gay street hustler and informer; two psychotic LA cops, one white and one black; and Howard Hughes’ Mormon aide, a closeted homosexual — among others.

   This goes on for two pages, explaining what occurred before in American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, a crackpot history of American conspiracy that has ended with Hoover engineering the assassination of Martin Luther King, an event that will eventually be his downfall through Dwight Holly, Wayne, and Crutch. I’d quote more, but it isn’t easy to find a good sustained quote that doesn’t end in an obscenity or two

   As Nixon nears the White House, the plots spin together in a melange of conspiracy and insanity that only ends when Crutch destroys Hoover’s secret files in an act of vandalism that triggers the FBI director’s fatal stroke.

   It’s difficult to describe the book. It is written in a style that is part jazz riff and part docu-noir, and spins from one act of stunning violence to another. The plot spins in and out of control from racial politics in the LA police to Hoover’s paranoia, to the growing radicalism of the protagonists as they rebel against the world they live and operate in, much of it inspired by Red Joan who eludes Hoover and the police while planting her seeds of discontent.

   Each of the three main protagonists is saved or destroyed by his own growing soul and conscience, and the book carries the story from the first two books to its logical end with the death of Hoover.

   Whether or not Ellroy believes this insane plot or not is impossible to tell. The book at times seems to have been bred out of Richard Condon by way of William Burroughs and The Turner Diaries. It all makes a sort of sense if you don’t stop too long to think about it, and certainly it is a brilliant work, though at times the confluence of plots, conspiracy, violence, and secret history threatens to teeter over into something closer to the Marx Brothers than the dark secret history of our recent past Ellroy intended. His ambition has almost, if not quite, exceeded his grasp and ours.

    Blood’s A Rover is the weakest of the three books in the trilogy, perhaps naturally since it is the repository for tying up all the loose ends. At times it feels as if you should have American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand open beside you as you read in order to keep up. Even then I don’t know if that would be possible.

   But Ellroy has developed a style and voice that are unique. No one else writes like him, and no one else finds that strange mix of humor, horror, paranoia, humanity, and violence that mark his works. It is the work of a master, about the price we pay to “live history,” but it is a masterwork that dares to dance dangerously close to the edge, and by staying true to his vision, its creator risks losing some readers to its purity of vision.

   There are times you may not know whether to laugh or cry, and times I’m not sure Ellroy knows whether he wants you to do one or perhaps both.

   This completes the “Underworld USA” trilogy, and ties it up, though I can’t say neatly. It is likely to stand a while as a unique achievement, but it is not without flaws, not without questions unanswered, but the trip is worth taking, even if untangling the conspiratorial plot may require a bottle of aspirin, and more than one reading.

   Blood’s A Rover is the work of a great writer stretching himself, but it is not a perfect work. Its flaws should not keep you away from the book, but anyone reading it should be warned. Ellroy’s world is unforgettable, but at times incomprehensible as well.

   Luckily his prose carries you past the rough patches, but when you turn the final page you may not be sure how you feel about the trip. At this point I suspect the final judgment of the critics will be to find this a flawed masterpiece by one of our most interesting writers, but I can’t say I would be too surprised if their judgement was simply, “huh?” It’s that kind of book.