SKINNER’S DRESS SUIT. Universal, 1926; Reginald Denny, Laura La Plante, Ben Hendricks, Jr., E. J. Ratcliffe, Arthur Lake, Hedda Hopper. Director: William A. Seiter. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

   Skinner and Honey (Denny and La Plante) are a young married couple, with Skinner’s office job bringing in a salary that’s not up to Honey’s expectations of her husband’s worth. Egged on by his ambitious wife, Skinner finally works himself up to asking his boss for a raise.

   Although the request is refused, Skinner finds himself incapable of confessing the failure to his wife, who immediately assumes he has the raise and starts spending down their savings on the expectation of the increased income.

   Denny and La Plante gave such charming performances that it was difficult for me to find his wimpiness and her pushy nature distasteful. As their financial difficulties mount, an invitation to a fancy party proves to be their salvation, a plot turn fueled by their skill at the Charleston that leads to a dancing sequence that lifts this expertly directed and played comedy to new levels of effervescence.

ARREST AND TRIAL. ABC-TV, 1963-64. Ben Gazzara, Chuck Connors, Roger Perry, John Larch, Don Galloway, Joe Higgins, John Kerr. On DVD: The Best of Arrest and Trial, Part Two, Timeless Media Group.

   I was disappointed with this set of shows. This was the 90 minute 1963 ABC series that first tried out the Law and Order formula of having the first half chart the police work and the second half cover the resulting legal proceeding.

   The difference here is that the second half focused on the defense attorney, rather than the prosecutors, in this case, Chuck Connors as “Irish” John Egan. Some critics said this undercut the show’s premise but I think it expanded the storytelling possibilities, although there are times you wonder which side of the street Egan is working.

   What hurt the show, based on the nine episodes on view in this three-disc set, was its length. It was too long, it was sloooow, scenes dragged or were dragged out for padding. It was confusing as stories lost their way and guest stars like James Whitmore, John McIntire, Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall gave great performances that were swallowed up in the maelstrom.

   The writers didn’t seem to know how to write for the show’s length; potentially strong 60 minute stories became weak, discursive and ultimately boring behemoths.

   While Connors projected authority and had presence as Egan, Ben Gazzara phoned in his cop character, Nick Anderson. Anderson was an absolute cipher and Ben did nothing to flesh him out.

   This isn’t so much a bad show as one that didn’t live up to its potential. There’s another box set out there, but I don’t think I’ll be looking it up.

ERIC C. EVANS – Misconstrued.

Worldwide; paperback reprint, Feb 2003. Hardcover edition, 2001, Avalon Books.

   I was talking about coincidences a while back, and (such is the way of the world) here’s a book that’s built on — well, if not a story-making coincidence of title-making proportions, a killer who’s awfully serendipitous in his choice of victims.

   Without letting the plot completely out of the bag, let me show you what I mean by quoting from page 217:

   Sam McKall, whose second recorded adventure this is, is the political aide to the governor of Utah, who (as the story begins) is trying to stop a nuclear waste dump being built on a Pishute reservation in the state. Pushed into investigating a series of deaths the police believe are only accidents, Sam and a reporter friend soon find themselves in what may be a huge conspiracy of corporate-based murder.

   What puzzled me almost as much as the case they’re working on, which is smoothly told, in a totally workmanlike manner, is why the capital of Utah is referred to as Wasatch City. A minor matter. I’ve only been there once, and maybe it is.

   What disappointed me was how the mix of cerebral detection with a modicum of action suddenly — with just over 20 pages to go — became an over-the-top (but non-pyrotechnic) thriller of Bruce Willis proportions.

   And surely we didn’t need most of Chapter 23, which recaps the entire scenario, filling in details we already knew. Better than average, then, but not by much.

      Bibliographic data:

   ERIC C(HARLES) EVANS

Endangered. Avalon, hc, 1999. Worldwide, pb, Jan 2001. Sam McKall.

The Key. Avalon, hc, 2000.

Misconstrued. Avon, hc, 2001. Worldwide, pb, Feb 2003. Sam McKall.

MARCO PAGE – Fast Company. Dodd Mead, hardcover, March 1938. Pocket #222, paperback; 1st printing, July 1943; Paperback Library 52-192, ca.1962. Film: MGM, 1938 (scw: Marco Page, Harold Tarshis; dir: Edward Buzzell).

   Marco Page, a pseudonym of Harry Kurnitz, 1909-1968, wrote or co-wrote 33 screenplays for Hollywood movies between 1938 and 1966. He wrote or adapted four plays for the stage between 1954 and 1963.

   More importantly for the purposes of this review, he wrote four mystery/detective novels between 1938 and 1955. Fast Company was the first of these.

   Of his screen work, Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) and The Thin Man Goes Home (1945) are the most telling of his style, because Page’s detecting couple in Fast Company is obviously based upon Nick and Nora Charles from Hammett’s novel The Thin Man (1934).

   The plot of Fast Company revolves around some dirty business going on in New York’s rare book trade. A frame-up and an elaborate scheme for stealing, altering and re-selling valuable books are the main plot-drivers in this fast-paced mystery.

   Rare book dealer Joel Glass (with help from his wife, Garda) discovers that working for insurance companies recovering valuable stolen books is more remunerative than depression era bookselling. The characters make prodigious amounts of wisecracks and drink prodigious amounts of liquor before the story is concluded.

   One would not think that so much gunplay, knife-throwing, fist-fighting, kidnapping, head-conking, pistol-whipping, book stealing and fem-fataling was going on in the 1930’s New York rare book milieu!

   The best way that I can describe Page’s recipe is as follows: Combine one part Hammett’s Nick and Nora with one part screwball comedy with one part thriller-ish action and then add a tiny dash of fair-play clueing.

   One plot point that really annoyed me was that, one day after a character is shot in the shoulder, he manages to free himself from being tied up, beats up a crook and jumps out of a second story window. It’s almost as if Page forgot that the character had been shot.

   To be fair to Page, the general consensus of Catalogue of Crime and Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers is that Fast Company is probably the weakest of his four mystery novels.

   Still, it was good enough to win Dodd Mead’s second Red Badge Prize Mystery award and got him to Hollywood where three movies were made based on the lead characters of Fast Company.

   Page/Kurnitz’s three other mystery novels are:

    The Shadowing Third (1946), in which NYC lawyer, David Calder, searches for a stolen priceless violin.

    Reclining Figure (1952), in which NYC art dealer, Ellis Blaise, investigates modern art forgeries in California.

    Invasion of Privacy (as Harry Kurnitz, 1955), wherein movie studio rep Mike Zorin troubleshoots for his employers.

   I have not read any of Page’s other work, but I’ll be on the lookout for his books just to see if he really did improve on his first effort.

Note: A very good review of Fast Company written on 05/09/08 by “prettysinister” on the LibraryThing website indicates that it was one of the earliest American bibliomystery novels. This doesn’t seem to be correct information. I will have to research further.

Coming soon: Another view of this book, taken from 1001 Midnights.

DAN CANDY’S LAW. American International Pictures, 1974; aka Alien Thunder. Donald Sutherland, Gordon Tootoosis, Chief Dan George, Kevin McCarthy, Francine Racette, Ernestine Gamble. Director: Claude Fournier.

   Based on an actual historical incident, and seemingly filmed on a budget of no more than two or three thousand dollars, this small movie filmed on location in Saskatchewan, Canada, still packs a remarkable punch.

   The movie, set in 1885, is based on the true story of a Cree Indian named Almighty Voice (Gordon Tootoosis), who after being arrested for killing one of the Queen’s cows, escapes from jail and kills the Mountie who goes after him.

   Leading his pursuers a merry chase for over a year with the unspoken help of his fellow tribesmen, his primary nemesis is Constable Dan Candy (Donald Sutherland).

   Filled with guilt for his laxness in allowing the prisoner to escape and for allowing his fellow officer (Kevin McCarthy, in a very brief role) to go out after him alone, Candy is obsessed with bringing Almighty Voice in, even to the extent of refusing orders and come back in by his commanding officer.

   The ending is both quite a shocker and very poignant, as some truly heavy artillery is brought in, with a multitude of town folk and native people standing and watching quietly up along the skyline above. It’s authentic, it’s moving, and it’s painful to watch.

   The setting is as authentic as in any western I’ve ever seen. It is as if someone with my father’s home movie camera in the 1940s went back in time and filmed the entire movie on location in grainy, faded color, complete with roughly constructed buildings with unpainted wooden shingles such as those I grew up seeing in my grandparents’ photo albums. I could swear that one of the children had a snowsuit on just like the one I had when I was six years old.

   Donald Sutherland, already an established star, turns in a remarkable performance for a salary that must have been peanuts, even in 1974.

   As a teller of tall tales, fully mustachioed, in one telling scene Dan Candy relates the son of the man who was killed a story about himself as a youngster and the privy his family had with a tar paper roof. In the summer when it got hot, birds would land on it and get stuck. After enough birds found themselves trapped on the roof, they all flew away with the outer building stuck to their feet and with his father still sitting there with his pants around his ankles, and that is how he remembers him, as he breaks down in tears.

   Beware by all means, though, if it’s possible, of the DVD produced by Mill Creek Entertainment. Whoever did the transfer knew nothing about scan and pan or any other enhancement that might indicate any sense of professionalism in their chosen line of work. In close-up many faces are sliced in half or worse, and sound effects are often heard but have no appreciable visual connection with what’s seen on the screen.

   The story line itself moves from scene to scene rather abruptly. I won’t blame the transfer guy for that, and once it’s gotten used to, it’s paradoxically as though the low grade production values only enhance the story.

   I don’t think I can explain any further. All I can do is repeat myself by recycling much of what I’ve said already. In spite of its many flaws, whatever their causes, this is a movie that feels authentic, it’s moving, and if you stay with it, the ending is one that’s painful to watch — and all the more so because you know it’s one that’s coming.

CAROLYN WELLS – Feathers Left Around. J. B. Lippincott, US/UK, hardcover, 1923.

   Perhaps the most perfect example of the stereotypically bad English country house mystery that I have read was published in 1923 by an American, Carolyn Wells. Sure, Feathers Left Around takes place in America, but it might as well be in the England of the classic Golden Age country house fantasy land of stereotype.

   The best thing about the tale is the whimsical title, the meaning of which we learn from this racially insensitive anecdote from one of the characters, the soon-to-be-murdered detective novelist, Mr. Curran:

   So the “Feathers” in the tale are the clues left around after Mr. Curran is found dead in a locked room, presumably murdered. About 80% of the novel is devoted to the bumbling efforts of a lone police detective and a surfeit of amateurs (five or more!) to solve the case, until Fleming Stone and his “saucy” boy assistant Fibsy show up to solve the case in short order.

   If this suggests that the mystery is a pretty simple one, you’re right. I penciled the solution in the margin on page 102, but had to wait about 240 pages for confirmation (I was right).

   No secret passages this time, but another trick that was used, with far more elaboration, by later authors John Dickson Carr and Nicholas Blake. This is the most interesting part of the book as far as plot is concerned, and might have made a mildly interesting short story. The murder method is fairly clued too, though the motive is deduced by Fleming Stone based on information not provided to the reader.

   Unfortunately, the novel is padded with ceaseless dialogue among a group of completely uninteresting ciphers, which soon becomes tedious. None of the men, with the exception of the imperious host of the house party, are really distinguishable, while one wishes that the women were extinguishable.

   There’s the pouty flirt who wraps all men around her finger (even the police detective, who, enchanted by the little lady’s pouts and simpers, agrees to lie about her having enjoyed a tete-a-tete out on the balcony with the deceased shortly before he died); the obvious heroine with a not-so-dark and easily-guessed secret; and the girl who likes to talk about her dreams and the utterly unconvincing Russian Countess. ( “Fiddle-dee-dee!” the Countess exclaims exotically at one point.)

   It becomes clear that there’s not a chance the author will allow one of these darling women to be the killer, their obviously being intended merely to provide “character interest” window dressing (variously humor and anxiety, as the case calls for).

   The author’s frivolous treatment of her female characters is further indicated when the men of the party inform the women that they are not allowed to investigate the murder scene for clues, this being man’s work, and the women submissively assent. Agatha Christie, where are you!

   Most fascinating about Feathers Left Around are the author’s attitudes about gender and especially class. It seems clear Wells has no clue what an actual police investigation is like, or, if she does, she determinedly keeps that knowledge to herself.

   When the five or so men of the party inform the detective that they want to accompany him to the scene of the crime to look for clues, the detective happily acquiesces, even though it’s quite apparent that one of these men may be the murderer.

   When the police detective comes to suspect that the fiancee of the house party host is implicated in the crime, the latter man orders the detective out of his house and threatens to kill him if he doesn’t leave. The detective meekly retreats.

   He does, however, terrorize the housemaids and threaten them with life imprisonment on bread and water in rat-infested jails if they do not answer his questions, and even allows one of the “gentlemen” to treat them so as well. (These scenes clearly are intended to be amusing.)

   In terms of social attitudes conveyed by the author, it could be England in 1860, with the police investigating the Constance Kent case. It’s instructive to compare this novel with the hardboiled tales that have come to represent American mystery — the contrast is remarkable.

   Far more than most Golden Age British tales I have read, Feathers Left Around strikes me as a real relic from the nineteenth century. That novels like this had a decent following (mostly female, judging by the book ads in the back of the book) suggests there was a significant conservative mystery audience in the United States as well as in Britain.

   Unfortunately, the novel also suggests that, though she may have had some mildly interesting plot ideas, Wells did not offer much else to engage the reader, aside from the sociological standpoint. Wells seems rather like an American Patricia Wentworth, though even the cozy Wentworth gives a more rigorous read, in my experience.

   I want my next Wells to come from near the end of her career (her last novel was published in 1942) to see if the events of the thirties ever induced her to modernize her style. Or was she still holding those same endless country house parties with the same boring society people during the Great Depression and World War Two?

I’LL NEVER FORGET YOU. 20th Century-Fox, 1951; aka The House in the Square (British title). Tyrone Power, Ann Blyth, Michael Rennie, Dennis Price, Beatrice Campbell, Raymond Huntley. Screenplay by Ranald MacDougall, based on the play Berkeley Square by John Balderston. Director: Roy Ward Baker.

   This is an old favorite of mine that is available for the first time on DVD. It’s based on the hit play Berkeley Square which was filmed earlier with Leslie Howard, and once I start to discuss it, the plot will seem familiar. It has been used countless times, but this is based on one of the original sources.

    In this version, Power is Peter Standish, a nuclear physicist in England working on a secret project. His work and the birth of the atomic age have left him a lonely man, and one rather fed up with this world and this time. When he meets Roger Forsyth (Michael Rennie), they hit it off, and he learns that Forsyth’s old family home was destroyed in the Blitz but some of it still stands. He agrees to meet Forsyth to see the old place that stood in fashionable Berkeley Square.

   Arriving before Forsyth, but after dark, he feels a strange tie to this place. A sense of déjà vu as if he had been here before. Wandering through the ruins he spots a surviving portrait still hanging over the remains of a hearth.

    The painting is of a beautiful woman and mesmerizes him. But when he moves on, he upsets some of the rubble and is knocked unconscious.

   And when he wakes up, he is in England of the 18th Century, the age of the Enlightenment and the birth of the modern scientific age. And by the way the film is suddenly in brilliant technicolor instead of the drab black and white of the introduction. Cinematic shorthand for how Power views his own world and time and the past as he sees it.

   Nothing new, the technique was used most famously in The Wizard of Oz and both Portrait of Jennie and Hitchcock’s Spellbound used color briefly for it’s visual qualities.

   He meets Forsyth’s ancestor and the girl in the portrait, Ann Blyth, with whom he is already half in love, the wife of wastrel Tom Pettigew (Dennis Price).

   Passing himself off as a Colonist to explain his accent, he puts his talents as a scientist to work to become something of a sensation with his wonders, but he draws too much attention, is accused of witchcraft, and is nearly killed.

   When he comes to he is again in postwar drab black-and-white England, having been found by Forsyth and his sister — Martha (Ann Blyth). The look between the two is enough to tell you that love has survived across time and they will finally be joined together.

   Music rises, fade out …

   This sort of romantic nonsense has been knocking around for quite a while. It’s pretty much the theme of George DuMaurier’s Peter Ibbetson, is touched on by some of Marie Corelli’s novels, is part of the fascination of Rider Haggard’s She, and shows up in novels like Edwin Lester Arnold’s Phra the Phoenician. John Dickson Carr used it in one of his best historical mysteries Fire Burns and to some extent in The Burning Court.

   For that matter it is pretty much how Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter gets to Mars — a combination of wish fulfillment Madame Blatavasky, Theosophy, reincarnation, and the whole fascination with the occult that played such a role at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century. Love conquers all and survives even death.

   As late as Richard Matheison’s Somewhere in Time it still enthralled audiences as Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour struggled with love across time and past lives.

   I’ve never seen Berkeley Square (1933), so I can’t say if this is as good a telling of the tale as the Leslie Howard film. It’s simply one I’ve seen perhaps a dozen times since I was a child, and it has always touched some chord with me.

   It may seem at best a rather tired fantasy to you, and that’s fine. But if you let it, the film has a charm all its own. Similar films include Enchantment with David Niven and even the Archers’ Stairway to Heaven, and the musicals Brigadoon and to a lesser extent Finian’s Rainbow.

   I confess I’m a sucker for them all. Probably my Highlander ancestors. All that Scotch and fog — you tended to see things. Cynical realists are warned to stay away.

   But if you ever one day dreamed of a another time or wanted to escape into a more romantic and less mundane world this is a good vehicle for it. It’s a bit like Shangri La, Brigadoon, or even forgotten Kor, it’s there to be found if only in your heart.

   I make no excuse for it as film art. It is quite simply a movie I love, whatever its flaws or failures, and there are few enough of those for any film lover.

Note: The 1933 version was directed by Frank Lloyd with Leslie Howard, Heather Angel, and Samuel S. Hinds. And anyone familiar with their Noel Coward will know the pronunciation is Barkley as in his popular song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” that became a sort of anthem for WW II England.

ROBERTSON DAVIES – High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories. Viking, US, hardcover, 1983; Penguin, softcover, many printings. First edition: Penguin Canada, 1982.

   Robertson Davies was a writer of considerable talent, and every Christmas he used to tell a ghost story to the students at Massey College. These tales are gathered together in High Spirits, and they make for fun, if not very spooky, reading.

   The tales in fact, are all mildly humorous and set very firmly in the context of Academia (hardly surprising, considering the audience). Thus we get stories of the spirit of a Grad Student, doomed to endlessly defend his thesis, the ghost of a forgotten University President, the souls of Canadian writers yearning to be re-born as American writers, and that sort of thing.

   Former Academicians both past and present could probably relate to these, and I found them entertaining enough, but hardly the sort of thing to evoke shudders in the Season of the Witch.

 WILLIAM TARG – The Case of Mr. Cassidy.

World Publishing Company, hardcover reprint, 1944. Originally published by Phoenix Press, hc, 1939, as by William Targ & Lewis Herman.

   This entertaining mystery, set in Chicago (the hometown of William Targ), introduces the erudite, paunchy amateur sleuth, Hugh Morris, who negotiates the pre-WWII Chicago literary scene as he keeps one step ahead of the police in their attempt to discover who murdered wealthy bibliophile James Cassidy and, subsequently, his private secretary.

   The police are convinced that the murderer was the mysterious Fiend, who has previously only murdered attractive young women in open areas.

   When the police corner and capture the Fiend, opportunely discovered with the body of his latest female victim, he readily confesses to the murder of Cassidy and his secretary, but, convinced that the Fiend is not the murderer of the two men, Morris continues his investigation.

   It leads him to Chicago nightclubs, bookstores, and restaurants, familiar landmarks that bring him with such personalities of the period as collector and author Vincent Starrett and bookstore owner Ben Abramson.

   Targ’s characters in his novel are skillfully if sketchily portrayed, with the exception of Morris, who comes off as a novelistic alter ego for Targ, sharing the same passionate interest in food, books, and the Chicago scene that characterize Targ as he describes himself in Indecent Pleasures (Macmillan, 1975), his compulsively readable biography.

   In addition to the obvious pleasure a book collector will take in the bibliophile aspects that include the important clue of a first edition of Poe’s Tamerlane, the fan of period prose will find some choice linguistic prose rhapsodies, like the following:

   Rex Stout, eat your heart out!

N.b. The Tower reprint (from which I was working) dropped the Herman by-line, but a query to Al Hubin confirmed that the Phoenix first edition did list both Targ and Herman as co-authors. (See also the cover above.)

SYDNEY HORLER – The Curse of Doone. Hodder & Stoughton, UK. hardcover, 1928. Mystery League, US, hardcover, 1930. US paperback reprint: Paperback Library 53-931, 1966.

   A journalist and writer of football stories (the British variety) until his early thirties, Sydney Horler began publishing “shockers” in 1925 and went on to produce upwards of a hundred over the next thirty years.

   He created a menage of series characters, most of them Secret Service agents of one kind or another, including Bunny Chipstead; “The Ace”; Nighthawk; Sir Brian Fordinghame; and that animal among men, Tiger Standish.

   The Standish books — Tiger Standish Steps on It (1940) is a representative title in more ways than one — were especially popular with Horler’ s readership. His greatest literary attribute was his imagination, which may be described as weedily fertile.

   His favorite antagonists were fanatic Germans and Fu Manchu-type megalomaniacs, many of whom were given sobriquets such as “the Disguiser,” “the Colossus,” “the Mutilator,” “the Master of Venom,” and “the Voice of Ice”; but he also contrived a number of other evildoers to match wits with his heroes — an impressive list of them that includes mad scientists, American gangsters, vampires, giant apes, ape-men from Borneo, venal dwarfs, slavering “Things,” a man born with the head of a wolf (no kidding; see Horror’s Head, 1934), and — perhaps his crowning achievement — a bloodsucking, man-eating bush (“The Red-Haired Death,” a novelette in The Destroyer, and The Red-Haired Death, 1938).

   The Curse of Doone is typical Horler, which is to say it is inspired nonsense. In London, Secret Service Agent Ian Heath meets a virgin in distress named Cicely Garrett and promptly falls in love with her. A friend of Heath’s, Jerry (who worries about “the primrose path to perdition”), urges him to toddle off to his cottage in Dartmoor for a much needed rest.

   Which Heath does, though not before barely surviving a mysterious poison-gas attack. And lo! — once there, he runs into Cicely, who is living at secluded and sinister Doone Hall.

   He also runs into a couple of incredible coincidences (another Horler stock-in-trade); monstrous vampire bats and the “Vampire of Doone Hall”; two bloody murders; hidden caves, secret panels and caches; a Prussian villain who became a homicidal maniac because he couldn’t cope with his sudden baldness; and a newly invented “war machine” that can force enemy aircraft out of the air by means of wireless waves and stop a car from five miles away.

   All of this is told in Hoder’s bombastic, idiosyncratic, and sometimes priggish style. (Horler had very definite opinions on just about everything, and was not above expressing them in his fiction, as well as in a number of nonfiction works. He once said of women: “Of how many women can it truly be said that they are worthy of their underclothes?” And of detective fiction: “I know I haven’t the brains to write a proper detective novel, but there is no class of literature for which I feel a deeper personal loathing.” Racism was another of his shortcomings; he didn’t like anybody except the English.)

   This and Horler’s other novels are high camp by today’s standards; The Curse of Doone is just one of several that can be considered, for their hilarious prose, pomposity, and absurd plots, as classics of their type.

   Unfortunately, most of Horler’s “shockers” were not reprinted in this country. Of those that were, the ones that rank with The Curse of Doone are The Order of the Octopus (1926), Peril (1930), Tiger Standish (1932), Lord of Terror (1937), and Dark Danger (1945).

         ———
   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.