RUSTLER’S PARADISE. Ajax Pictures, 1935. Harry Carey, Gertrude Messinger, Edmund Cobb, Carmen Bailey, Theodore Lorch. Story-screenwriter-director: Harry L. Fraser.

   Rustler’s Paradise.could have sat right up there with Ride Lonesome and The Searchers for sheer perverse obsession, but as served up in the clumsy mitts of Director Harry Fraser, it just seems a bit quirky.

   Loveable, crusty old Harry Carey Sr. plays a vengeful cowboy out to get the guy who seduced his wife and stole his daughter, and in his late 50s here, he’s a bit old to be carrying the heavy heroics, but he acquits himself with his own unassuming charm, and his age even lends a bit of authenticity to the proceedings.

   Just as engaging is Edmond Cobb, looking like a cartoon villain with oversize nose and pointy chin, and his final comeuppance at the hands of loveable, crusty old Harry comes as rather a shock.

   There’s a potentially very effective moment where the outlaw gang, rushing to the hideout to dispose of Carey, see what he’s done to their boss, and all the fight just runs right out of them.

   Which could have been quite enjoyable in the hands of a capable director.

   But director Harry Fraser snuffs the glimmerings of anything strange and memorable in Rustler’s Paradise pretty quickly. Fans of Ed Wood should take a look at Fraser’s oeuvre and be humbled at the feet of the master.

   Where Wood made a few bad movies, Fraser was an auteur of epic ineptitude who stayed in the cheap-movie industry for a quarter century, turning out things like Captain America (the serial with the Atomic Vibrator), Chained for Life (a murder movie with actual conjoined twins as stars) and The White Gorilla, which features Ray Corrigan chasing himself in an ape suit.

   In Rustler’s Paradise Fraser takes the directorial reins, uses them to strangle a fine actor, and turns an off-beat story into something barely coherent. Dreadful, but typical of the man.

LINDA CASTILLO – A Whisper in the Dark. Berkley Sensation; paperback original, August 2006.

   The brief notice about this book in my local mystery supplier’s bi-monthly newsletter described the protagonist as the owner of an antiquarian bookstore in New Orleans.

   That sounded promising so I bought the book and, some weeks later, settled down to read it on a very cold day in February. What was not noted was that the writer is generally known as a writer of romantic suspense, and Whisper has far too much heavy breathing and fatal attraction romantic fol-de-rol for me.

   A stalker is targeting Julia Wainwright because of her pseudonymous soft-corn pornographic novel that he considers sinful and makes of her a harlot. Yet he’s aroused by her while she’s irresistibly drawn to a former cop she lusted after when she was 15 and who has returned to New Orleans after killing an undercover cop in a Chicago shoot-out and is drinking himself into oblivion as he fights his primal urges that have him lusting after…

   Oh, this isn’t worth taking up anymore of anybody’s time. I will add that Julia’s father is a prominent church leader who’s unaware of her novel. I read the beginning, sampled the middle and raced through the climax.

   I need to look more closely at the books I buy, and especially at the writers’ track record.

JULIAN SYMONS – The Broken Penny. Victor Gollancz, UK. hardcover, 1953. Harper & Bros., US, hc, 1953*. US paperback reprints include: Dolphin C227, 1960; Beagle, 1971; Perennial Library P480, 1980; Carroll & Graf, 1988*.     (* = shown)

   Many writers of espionage are content to rely on newspaper stories thinly disguised as fiction, with terrorism and hijacking their stock in trade. Though The Broken Penny (1953), recently reprinted by Carroll and Graf, is flawed, it remains a much more imaginative cold-war thriller.

   Telling of the attempt to oust the communist government of a country never named, but apparently based on Poland, Symons provides a devastating picture of people under the totalitarian yoke, but he saves some room to show Britain and the British army in what is not their finest hour.

   There is suspense, but mostly The Broken Penny is about the attempt of its protagonist to maintain his Idealism in a world that had gone mad in the early 1950s — and isn’t much saner as I write these words.

   [EDITORIAL COMMENT.] The fellow in the cover of the Carroll & Graf paperback edition looks a lot like Henry Fonda to me. The girl looks familiar as well, but I can’t put a name to the face. This is rather surprising, as there never was a film version of The Broken Penny.

   In fact, and what’s even more surprising, is that according to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, of all the mystery novels that Julian Symons wrote, only one of them has ever been made into a movie, that one being The Narrowing Circle (1954; film, 1955).

   The detective in that book was Inspector Crambo, who also appeared in The Gigantic Shadow (1958, published in the US as The Pipe Dream). According to IMDB, Trevor Reid played Inspector ‘Dumb’ Crambo in The Narrowing Circle, which also featured Paul Carpenter, Hazel Court and Russell Napier. (And if Hazel Court is in it, then it’s a must find.)

   Included in the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, a series episode of Kraft Suspense Theater entitled “Twixt the Cup and the Lip” was based on a short story in the collection How to Trap a Crook and 12 Other Mysteries.

   But it looks as though I’ll have to tell Al Hubin about this: According to IMDB, the following Symons novels were also turned to movies:

      Criss Cross Code (*) as Counterspy.

      The Man Who Killed Himself as Arthur! Arthur!

      The Blackheath Poisonings, as a 3-part miniseries.

      [??] as Die Spur führt ins Verderben. (**)

  (*) This is not a novel, but a perhaps uncollected novelette first published in Lilliput, Aug-Sept 1951. (**) According to Babel Fish, a direct translation is “The trace leads into spoiling.”

[UPDATE] 06-17-09.   Al Hubin has agreed that items 2 and 3 should be in CFIV, and the first also, but only if “Criss Cross Code” appeared in a Symons story collection, perhaps in retitled form.

   Also, in the comments, Steve W. has pointed out that The Thirty-First of February “was made into what I remember to be a quite good episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour.”

   True. It was, and I missed it when I was researching Symons on IMDB last night. Date: 4 January 1963, and as Steve advised me in a followup email, “the whole season is available at Hulu. Here’s the link to the Symons adaptation: HULU: 31st of February.”

   So far, I’ve managed to stay away from Hulu. I spend too much time at the computer as it is, and to start watching TV here at my desk might mean never getting anything done. Nonetheless, there might be a possibility of exceptions being made. Maybe now and then?

COLIN WATSON – Just What the Doctor Ordered.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1969. Paperback reprint: Dell, US, 1982 [Murder Ink #37]. Published earlier in the UK as The Flaxborough Crab; Eyre, hc, 1969.

   One measure of accomplishment for any writer of fiction is how successfully he or she transports us to his/her own individual world of imagination. Certainly one of the more successful in this regard is Colin Watson and his fictional town of Flaxborough.

   Much to our delight, and to the chagrin of Inspector Purbright of the Flaxborough Police Department, an amazing amount of crime seems to occur in this English village.

   Just What the Doctor Ordered begins with a number of sexual assaults on the women of the town. Miss Butters is accosted in Gorry Wood; Miss Sweeting on Heston Lane; Miss Pollock by the reservoir; and at St. Hilda’s a man threatens to “pollinate” Mrs. Pasquith.

   The fact that the attacks are perpetrated by elderly gentlemen, who make their escape by running sideways, only adds to the puzzlement. Inspector Purbright at first suspects an herbal concoction that promises amazing renewed virility. But few cases are quite so simple, as any Colin Watson fan will tell you, and this one takes several additional turns, including murder, before a solution is found.

   Inspector Purbright –flanked by his superior, Chief Constable Chubb; his subordinate, Sergeant Love; and his perpetual thorn-in-the-side, Miss Lucilla Teatime — is at the center of the Flaxborough novels, but the real stars are the amusing and eccentric townspeople themselves.

   This and the other novels in the series are recommended without reservation. Those other novels include Hopjoy Was Here (1963), Charity Ends at Home (1968), Six Nuns and a Shotgun (1975), Plaster Sinners (1981), and Whatever Happened at Mumbleshy? (1983).

   Colin Watson is also the author of an excellent sociological study of the British crime novel between the two world wars, Snobbery with Violence (1971; revised edition, 1979).

         ———
   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.]   Flaxborough fans — and I’m sure you already know who you are — will have already recognized this particular adventure — under its British title, of course — as the third of four Inspector Purbright cases that were adapted for TV by the BBC in 1977. The first two in the recently released box set were reviewed here not so very long ago.

[UPDATE] 06-17-09.   Check the comments for a complete list of all of the Inspector Purbright novels, taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

H. C. McNEILE [SAPPER] – The Black Gang.

Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1922, as by “Sapper.” Doubleday Doran & Co., US, hardcover, 1922. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft. Filmed as The Return of Bulldog Drummond: BIP, 1934, screenwriter/director: Walter Summers.

   Readers should be warned that I am going to write a positive review of one of the most excoriated books in the thriller genre, and I should know since I have been among those excoriating it. That said, I think someone needs to point out why Sapper (Herman Cyril McNeile) and Bulldog Drummond have lingered so long in the public imagination and are still read today by some — myself included.

   The reasons aren’t just historical nor the relative low state of the public taste, and there are reasons Drummond inspired writers like Ian Fleming and Clive Cussler, not to mention Lester Dent and Doc Savage, Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer, Leslie Charteris and the Saint, and John Creasey and Patrick Dawlish.

   There is more going on here than just a brief popular phenomena. Today the name still has a certain evocation, a fact expressed by it’s use by a well known design firm and it’s presence in the rock lyrics of the band the Coasters in their 1957 song “Searchin!”

   Sapper was one of the writers critic and journalist Richard Usborne defined as “The Clubland Heroes,” in his book of that name, a study of Dornford Yates, Sapper, and John Buchan’s novels about West End club men heroes of a particular brand of thriller (or shocker as Buchan preferred) that was popular in the period between WWI and WWII. (Buchan, it should be noted, began as early as 1910).

   Sapper began his career writing in the Kipling mode (which he never fully escaped) in short stories set in the trenches of WWI France. His popular collections of short fiction exemplified the British soldier and particularly the upper middle class Englishman, a sportsman who for some tragic reason might be an ordinary ranker or perhaps an officer, and become involved in some dramatic wartime incident (and following Kipling’s lead from the Soldier’s Three stories, a fair number of comic ones). At the site devoted to the artwork on the dust jackets of books about the Great War (I) an entire page is devoted to Sapper.

   At the war’s end McNeile returned to England, and like many men in his position he was dissatisfied and found it difficult to readjust. He probably didn’t feel the general malaise and depression many veterans did, he just wasn’t the type, but it was a result of his war experience and disillusion with civilian life that he wrote his 1920 novel Bulldog Drummond: the Story of a Demobilized Officer Who Found Peacetime Dull.

   Captain Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond is a large cheerfully ugly type (with beautiful eyes and a charming smile) who indeed finds peacetime dull, so from his flat in Half Moon Street in London’s fashionable West End he takes out an ad advertising his services.

   The ad brings one Phyllis Benton (of the golden brown curls), a lady in distress whose father is being held by mysterious men. And we’re off. Soon Drummond is joined by his friends Peter Darrell (second in command), Algy Longworth (silly ass), Ted Jerringham (�a good amateur actor”) and Toby Sinclair (V.C. no less).

   As Usborne points out it is the world of the public school scrum with beer and martinis. (Sapper had obviously read his Baroness Orczy, for the lads sound an awful lot like the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel and much of Drummond’s drawling and babbling is drawn from the Pimpernel himself, Sir Percy Blakeney.) An entire generation of young Englishmen had died in the trenches of the Great War, and in the adventures of Drummond and his friends they were reborn in the popular imagination.

   But as in the public school scrum there is the ‘enemy’, and here Sapper outdoes himself, for in his first four adventures Drummond is opposed by one of the great villains in popular literature, a figure of cunning and cold intellect who could give Moriarity and Fu Manchu a run for their money and was the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond’s ultimate rival Ernst Stavro Blofield of Spectre, namely Carl Peterson.

   Indeed Peterson is such a good villain Usborne gives him his own chapter in The Clubland Heroes, the only villain to earn such an honor, or deserve it.

   And if Peterson isn’t enough Sapper outdoes himself by giving him an adoring and worshipful black widow of a mistress, Irma Peterson, the slinkiest deadliest and most evil companion in the literature. If Peterson didn’t consistently overestimate Drummond’s intelligence and always fail to plan for the most obvious action it is pretty clear our hero would never have had a chance. He’s outmatched by a mile.

   There’s a plot in progress to bring ruin not just to Phyllis’s father, but the entire British economic system. Before it’s over Drummond will have strangled a full grown ape in a pitched battle in the dark, played commando assaulting Peterson’s stronghold, and tossed Peterson’s second in command Henry Lakington into a much deserved acid bath. (�The retribution is just.”)

   England is saved, Peterson and Irma escape, and Drummond marries Phyllis, who has already begun her notable career of being the most kidnapped wife in literature. (The Spider’s companion Nita Van Sloan may have outdone Phyllis, but then she wasn’t a wife.)

   Sapper may not have been subtle, but he had a fine eye for melodrama. Bulldog Drummond was an immediate success and there was little doubt he would be back, although between the first and second books Sapper produced a series of connected stories about another hero, monocled Jim Maitland.

   Jim Maitland (1921) is probably Sapper’s best book and best character, but in this article slash review we are involved with Drummond, and his second adventure, The Black Gang, the latter referring to Drummond’s black-hooded and black leather clad team of self-styled vigilantes who have been terrorizing the criminal element in England in the period before the novel begins.

   The focus of the book is another plot against England that’s afoot at Carl Peterson’s hands. (He’s now disguised as “a splendid example of the right sort of clergyman, tall, broad shouldered, with a pair of shrewd, kindly eyes.”)

   This time Carl is behind a phony peace movement and in league with actual Bolsheviks, including the murderous Yulowski who has brought to England with him the very rifle with which he clubbed the Romanov royals to death. (Before it’s over Drummond and Phyllis will only just escape the same fate with the royally blooded rifle.) Nothing less than a Communist Revolution in England is at hand.

   Meanwhile Sir Bryan Johnstone, the Yard’s Director of Criminal Investigation and Chief Inspector MacIver are getting nowhere with a mysterious group of ruffians in black leather and hoods who have been making hay with London’s less social class of criminals.

   White slavers, pimps (though implied, never mentioned obviously), usurers, and the like have been disappearing, and when they do show up again keeping silence after some decidedly rough treatment that has shown them the error of their ways, while the Reds are up to something.

   In the meantime, if things aren’t bad enough for Hugh Drummond, the boy who had been Johnstone’s fag at school (and no, it doesn’t have the same meaning in England) shows up on his door burbling nonsense.

   Before it’s over Drummond will just miss being blown up by a grenade (the fellow beside him gets blown to gory bits — it hardly puts Drummond off his beer or his feed though), and just misses being poisoned by a Borgia poison in a doyley at the Ritz, not to mention that Russian rifle butt that once graced royal skulls. Drummond and Phyllis are captured, Carl takes the time to gloat:

   Of course Drummond does escape, foils Peterson’s plot, and rescues Phyllis, he even convinces Scotland Yard that the Black Gang has played an important role in the deadly doings. He also spares Peterson’s life at Phyllis insistence:

   To be fair, Phyllis is less concerned about Peterson than the inhuman rage her husband is in, having moments before pinned the murderous Yulowski to the wall with his own bayonet like a giant butterfly on cardboard. Carl won’t be quite so lucky two books later in The Final Count, when he meets his end at Drummond’s hands in an airship (the Megalithic) over London.

   Richard Usborne thinks Sapper blows this moment, which he humorously attributes to the narrator of the story, but I agree with Kingsley Amis in his book on James Bond, The James Bond Dossier. It is Sapper at his most powerful.

   The plot is averted, and the Black Gang retired, but they wait, they wait. Irma comes back in the fifth book, The Female of the Species, for revenge (Phyllis gets kidnapped again, and kills her first man with a spanner) and then off and on for the rest of the series, well into the ones written by Sapper’s successor Gerard Fairlie (who was a better writer overall, and the actual model for Drummond as well as an actual secret agent who operated behind enemy lines in WWII). The latter even brought the Black Gang back in the last Drummond novel, The Return of the Black Gang (1952), but in a much more politically correct fashion.

   Now, what was so objectionable? Well, in The Black Gang maybe it’s the constant harping on the clique of murderous Russian Jews who killed the Tsar, or the flashy types who are in the white slavery business, or maybe it’s the little island the Black Gang have set up where an ex-sergeant major and some demobilized officers have set up a concentration camp for these low types — Jews and foreigners and other less attractive sorts — where they have been taught the error of their ways with a bullwhip and the boot.

   Fortunately this happens offstage, but it is difficult for a modern reader to read this passage without visions of jackboots and SS uniforms. But the fault is history’s and not Sapper’s. If we apply the same standards, Mickey Spillane only fares a little better.

   And look at it this way. In England where there was the outlet of popular literature this only happened in a book, and only to actual criminals, not ordinary people, and no women or children or innocents. In Germany where there was no real tradition of this kind of thriller literature to speak of; it happened in the streets and people looked away or pretended it wasn’t happening.

   Some, there, and here, still pretend it didn’t happen today, but while the attitudes of the Drummond books and others may not be enlightened, it isn’t fair to brand them as would-be storm troopers either.

   By the standards of the day Sapper is only a minor offender. It takes Sydney Horler or M.P. Shiel to really be offensive. Sapper was at worst only aping popular sentiments and opinions that, however despicable, need to be viewed in historical perspective. This is not an apologia for him or others, only a perspective.

   If you can’t overlook or understand the limits of older popular fiction then you probably would do best to avoid it.

   By its very nature popular fiction reflects popular views, and luckily as time passes we progress, slowly, in our recognition of our prejudices and failures. Popular fiction is at worst a bellwether, not a clarion call to action.

   No apology, it’s nasty stuff, but it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. The Black Gang was written in 1922, long before the horrors of the Holocaust and at a time when ‘concentration camp’ only referred to the prisons where Boers had been held in the Boer War.

   The casual Anti-Semitism of the book was fairly standard in popular fiction of the day. (It even shows up a little in Buchan, who was not the least anti-Semitic and indeed an early voice to warn of Fascism.) This is before Mussolini and his Blackshirts, well before Hitler and the Brownshirts, and still several years out from Sir Oswald Mosely and his own Black Gang of would be traitors.

   Sapper’s overgrown bully boys aren’t that far off from Sherlock Holmes taking the law into his own hands, the Scarlet Pimpernel’s League, or even the Saint’s war on boredom, just a bit less smooth and suave about it. There is no excuse, but you can’t judge the book or Sapper based on what happened over a decade later. No one really understood, not even the victims, until if was too late.

   But judge The Black Gang on its own merits and it is one of the best of the Drummond books. The incidents are exciting, Drummond is probably at his most attractive (and least annoying), and as a thriller it is first rate entertainment. There are some splendid set pieces such as when Peterson’s men are hunting Drummond who picks them off one by one in the dark, and the final confrontation with Yulowski and Peterson, and in Drummond’s defense Peterson’s victims number in the hundreds.

   Carl may be a charming monster, but he’s a monster none the less, who plots to overthrow England for nothing more than his own financial improvement and a distaste for England and the English. Carl believes in nothing but Carl and is loyal to no cause but his own.

   The Black Gang came to the screen as The Return of Bulldog Drummond (not based on the book of that name) with Ralph Richardson as Drummond and Francis L. Sullivan a fine Peterson.

   The Black Gang was present in black leather and on motorbikes, but some of the less appealing aspects of the book were left off. It’s not a bad little movie, and Richardson is quite good (ironically he plays the villain in the spoof Bulldog Jack penned by Sapper and Gerard Fairlie) looking forward to the role in Q Planes (Clouds Over Europe) where his suave British agent would inspire the creation of John Steed of the Avengers.

    Drummond found his way to the screen as early as the silents, but it was 1929’s talkie Bulldog Drummond with Ronald Colman as Drummond, Joan Bennett as Phyllis, and Montagu Love as Peterson that really put the character in the public eye. It seems strange today when we note Colman was nominated for an Academy Award playing Drummond (stranger still that he was beaten by Warner Baxter in In Old Arizona playing the Cisco Kid).

   Temple Tower (a lost film), The Return of …, and Bulldog Drummond At Bay (with American John Lodge coming physically closest to Sapper’s interpretation of Drummond) followed, but it’s 1934’s Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back that inspired the series that followed.

   Ronald Colman was again Drummond, Charles Butterworth a droll Algy (and Ona Munson his long suffering bride), Loretta Young the lady in danger, Sir C. Aubrey Smith Colonel Neilson Drummond’s friend at the Yard, and no less than Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu Warner Oland as an Egyptian prince involved in dastardly doings.

   It is one of the brightest mystery comedies of an age when the form was at its peak and still holds up today thanks to fine performances, direction, and script. It was also a big hit and inspired a series of B films. The first was Bulldog Drummond Escapes with Ray Milland as Drummond, but the series proper featured John Howard (who played Colman’s younger brother in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon), Reginald Denny as Algy, E. E. Clive as Drummond’s servant Tenny (changed from Denny in the novels for obvious reasons), and John Barrymore as Neilson (eventually replaced by veteran H.B. Warner).

   A running gag had Drummond’s pending marriage to Phyllis (Louise Campbell and later Heather Angel) always being put off by his latest adventure. The series was well produced and written, and had a fine array of villains including George Zucco, Porter Hall, Leo G. Carroll, Anthony Quinn, and Eduardo Cianelli.

   When the Howard series ended Tom Conway and Ron Randell each did two Drummond films, and in 1951, Victor Saville did an A picture, Calling Bulldog Drummond, based on one of Fairlie’s books (and written by him) with Walter Pidgeon as Drummond and a supporting cast that included David Tomlinson (Father in Mary Poppins) as Algy, Margaret Leighton as an undercover policewoman, Robert Beatty (who would play Drummond in a television pilot aired on the Douglas Fairbanks Jr,. Show) as a gangster, and James Bond’s future M, Bernard Lee in a key role.

   Save for the television pilot Drummond lay in doggo until 1966 when he was revived for two Bondish outings starring Richard Johnson as an updated Drummond, Deadlier Than the Male and Some Girls Do. Both films are fun, with a deadly game of chess on a giant board an excellent set piece in the first one, and Nigel Green outstanding as Peterson. (James Villiers is only a little less perfect in the second film.) Elke Summer and Sylvia Koscina in the first and Daliah Lavi in the second are Peterson’s murderous cohorts.

   Drummond also had a long and successful career on radio (�Out of the fog, out of the night …”) in a series starring Santos Ortega and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. In 2006 Moonstone Comics brought Drummond back in a comic book written by William Messner Loebs in which Drummond becomes a sort of private detective and we discover Phyllis and Irma are one and the same.

It’s a terrific little adventure that remains true to Sapper’s Drummond while updating many aspect of the story. Drummond also features in Kim Newman’s second book in his Anno Dracula trilogy, The Bloody Red Baron, as a nasty vampire, and a psychotic violent old prig in the third volume of Alan Moore’s graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.

   Seems you can’t keep a good — or bad — man down. There is even a play and movie by Alan Shearman, Bullshot Crummond, that is a dead on send up of all things Drummond.

   Drummond has been around close to ninety years now, and is still going fairly strong. The name still evokes foggy roads, low slung speeding sports cars, dastardly villains, and dangerous adventure with pitched battles in which the fate of nations is at stake.

   Leslie Charteris modeled the early Saint on Drummond (but he was a much better writer) and Doc Savage and his crew owe more than at little to Drummond and his.

   Mickey Spillane was a fan, as was Ian Fleming. (British traitor Guy Burgess supposedly observed that James Bond was Bulldog Drummond to the waist and Mike Hammer from the waist down.) More recently Clive Cussler has mentioned Drummond as a major influence on Dirk Pitt. When Paul Gallico reviewed Casino Royale he called James Bond “Bulldog Drummond with brains.”

   The first seven books in the Drummond series (Bulldog Drummond, The Black Gang, The Third Round, The Final Count, Female of the Species, The Return of Bulldog Drummond, and Temple Tower can be found online in free ebook editions with a little searching.

   Jim Maitland, and at least three of the short story collections are available too. The Howard films are easy (and inexpensive) to find on DVD, Deadlier Than the Male and Some Girls Do are a bit more expensive but also available in handsome DVD packages.

   The pilot film with Robert Beatty can be found on some sets of old television detective series. Calling Bulldog Drummond often shows up on TCM as it was an MGM film. Most of the others can be found on the gray market with the exception of Temple Tower and the silent Drummonds.

   The first Colman film is in public domain and can be downloaded direct to your PC. Several old-time radio sites offer free episodes of the radio series you can listen to or download, and cassettes and CDs of many episodes are available as well.

   The Fairlie books, some of which were not published in the United States, are a bit harder to find than the original Sapper books, but none of them are really all that difficult with a little effort. There are also five Drummond short stories (the best known being “The Thirteen Lead Soldiers” basis for one of the Conway films) collected for the first time in The Best Short Stories By Sapper.

   Bulldog Drummond is still with us. He can be a bit noisy, and he has a tendency to blather in the way of heroes of his era, but he’s good company on an adventure where the stakes are high and the odds are dicey.

   Before you dismiss him you might keep in mind that half the books on the shelves of the mystery and thriller genre owe something to him. He’s a bit like one of those uncles that you love, but sometimes hate to admit you are related to. But bless him or damn him, he’s one of the family, and the resemblance can’t be denied.

MURDER MOST ENGLISH: A FLAXBOROUGH CHRONICLE. TV series: BBC, 1977. Anton Rodgers (Detective Inspector Purbright), Christopher Timothy (Detective Sergeant Love), John Comer (Sergeant Malley), Moray Watson (Chief Constable Chubb).

● Hopjoy Was Here. May 8 & May 15, 1977. John Normington, Lynn Farleigh, Gary Watson, Michael Robbins. Based on the novel by Colin Watson; screenplay: Richard Harris. Director: Ronald Wilson.

● Lonelyheart 4122. May 15 & May 22, 1977. Brenda Bruce (Lucy Teatime), John Carson, Gillian Martell, Erin Geraghty. Based on the novel by Colin Watson; screenplay: Richard Harris. Director: Ronald Wilson.

   In the seven episodes of this (alas) short-lived series, a total of four of Colin Watson’s “Flaxborough” mysteries were adapted. So far I’ve watched only the two above. The other two are:

    ● The Flaxborough Crab. May 29 & June 5, 1977.

    ● Coffin Scarcely Used. June 12 & June 19, 1977.

… and both are on my “to be watched soon” list, although I’m not likely to review them here. (There are too many TV detective shows to be watched and too little time to report on them, I’m sorry to say, or rather I’m only sorry about the second part of that sentence.)

   There is more wickedness going on in small villages, I believe Watson is trying to say — and successfully, too, as far as I’m concerned — than meets the eye, or the eye, that is to say, of the most cosmopolitan resident of London, Liverpool or any other large British city.

   In Hopjoy Was Here, for example, a fellow named Hopjoy has disappeared and is most probably dead, his body most likely dissolved in acid and quietly disposed of down the bathtub drain. He was secretly working as an espionage agent for some hush-hush secret agency, and while two of his colleagues are working on their side of the tracks, Inspector Purbright is working quite another.

   It is quite amusing to see the two agents flailing around in their darkness of broad daylight, while Purbright, who knows the countryside and the people who inhabit it, calmly smokes his pipe (most often in ugly plaid jackets that were quite the rage in the 1970s) and comes out far ahead of the game.

   Not that the case doesn’t have its challenges. By the time the second installment began, I was sure I was far ahead of the good inspector, but he soon had caught up to me, only to … but I can’t tell you that.

   The solution depends greatly on a working knowledge of people and their faults and foibles, and Purbright seems to a gentle, bucolic master of it, to the (sometimes perplexed) delight of his Chief Constable, and the dismay of Hopjoy’s fellow agents.

   In Lonelyheart 4122, Purbright finds himself competing with another protagonist to solve the disappearance of two lonely women who had signed up for the same matrimonial service several months apart. Meet the very capable (and cigar-smoking) Lucy Teatime, who also seems to have designs on the killer — but for what reason?

   Again you will have to watch to find out. The game of wits between Purbright and Miss Teatime is delightful, but the mystery itself is not nearly the challenge that was presented in Episode One, as the killer is quite obvious. Even so, there’s a kicker in the plot toward the end that I’m sure you will find quite satisfying.

   And, oh yes, there’s one more thing. While the production values are of good television quality, they’re nowhere near as fine as even the most average movie. That doesn’t mean, though — and this is a big “though” — that you shouldn’t be watching every corner of the screen for small bits of business in the background.

   This entails anything involving any of the other players, both those important to the plot and those really only incidentally in the scene, with a special mention going to Christopher Timothy as Detective Sergeant Love and his aversion to “human remains.” (He’s the one on the left in the second scene down.)

 DOROTHY B. HUGHES – Ride the Pink Horse.

Duell, Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1946. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft, including Carroll & Graf, pb, 1988.

● Film: Universal International, 1947. Robert Montgomery, Wanda Hendrix, Andrea King, Thomas Gomez, Fred Clark. Screenwriter: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer; director: Robert Montgomery.

   I’m especially fond of regional mysteries, especially those set in New Mexico, a state as beautiful as any in the United States.

   Fortunately, the state has had some good mystery writers use it, including Richard Martin Stern, Tony Hillerman, and Dorothy B. Hughes in Ride the Pink Horse, recently reprinted by Carroll and Graf.

   Many mystery fans remember the excellent movie based on it and, indeed, the cover of this reprint portrays a man who looks like Robert Montgomery, the film’s star. (That’s he in the scene below, along with Andrea King.)

   The book is set in Santa Fe during that city’s most colorful time, the annual Labor Day weekend fiesta. Hughes captures the city and its mixture of three cultures: Indian, Spanish, and “Gringo.”

   Though some of the attitudes in the book seem a bit dated, i.e., the post World War II mixture of cynicism and idealism, here, too, is a book which has stood the difficult test of time.

STEWART STERLING – Where There’s Smoke.

J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1946. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, 4-in1 edition, April 1947. Paperback reprint: Dell 275, mapback edition, 1949.

    Saying that the Dell mapback has a great cover and leaving it at that is a temptation. But our noble editor has a strange notion that his readers should get their money’s worth, so ever onward and downward.

    A two-alarm fire at the Brockhurst Theater leads to the discovery of a body burned to death, although the chap would also have died shortly from drinking denatured alcohol. The fire was deliberately set. Whoever was after the poor guy, and apparently. he had nothing but enemies, wasn’t taking any chances.

    Fire Marshal Ben Pedley investigates this fire and a later fire and is involved in a third one. He also —

    — Is “barrelling” up “sleet greased” Broadway in New York at a “screaming” seventy miles per hour worrying about the equipment responding to the second alarm because “no driver could get up to speed” on those streets. He then bears down on the gas.

    — Nearly dies in the first fire rescuing a damsel in distress.

    — Is conked over the head and tied up while searching the dead man’s apartment. (A killer, who later tries to do away with Pedley, does the conking and tieing. Why he doesn’t get it over with then is only conjecture, but it’s probably because there was still four fifths of the novel yet to come.)

    — Nearly dies when the floor collapses under him while he is investigating a fire in progress.

    — Lets a prisoner drive his car, rather than cuff the guy. (“Better this way,” Pedley says smugly and erroneously. The prisoner wrecks the car at fifty miles per hour. He escapes unscathed, while Pedley gets a bruised thigh.)

    — Is shot at in a lawyer’s office by the guy who didn’t kill him at the apartment. I’m taking the author’s word for it here. I’m still trying to figure out how and why it happened the way he says it happened.

    — Is nearly drowned in the pool at a Turkish bath by the guy who didn’t. try to kill him at the apartment and failed to kill him at the lawyer’s office. .

    — Is laid out by a blow from a revolver butt to the bridge of his nose.

    — Rescues again, more or less, the same damsel in distress from another fire and comes close to being burned alive.

    One doesn’t expect a novel to be completely realistic, but there ought to be some connection with the real world.

    Fire-fighting buffs should stick to Dennis Smith.

THOMAS GIFFORD – The Glendower Legacy.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1978. Paperback reprint: Pocket, 1979.

   The world of academia scores a couple of telling blows to the ungodly in this, the latest thriller to come from the typewriter of the author of the highly acclaimed The Wind Chill Factor, but otherwise not all is well.

   To borrow a term from the incomparable Mr. Hitchcock of movie fame, the MacGuffin, the object that all parties devoutly desire but which in fact may be all that keeps the plot moving, is a document dating from the days of the American Revolution — from Valley Forge, to be precise, at a time when morale was low and the ravages of dysentery were visibly high.

   Betrayal at any moment, even by the commander-in-chief himself, given the right conditions and frame of mind, was a distinct possibility.

   If this document could be authenticated, the resulting scandal would rock the nation, and a director of the Russian KGB with a sense of humor takes a serious interest as well. The scene shifts dramatically to Harvard Square and then to the remotest crannies of Maine before heading even further north, to a massive house located high up on the rocks of the Nova Scotia coast.

   The hero, taking the role that Cary Grant would play, is a naive, middle-aged professor of American history, and in spite of their initial mutual antagonisms, when he takes refuge in the home of the fiercely liberated TV newsperson (Audrey Hepburn), you know that everything is just going to work out all right.

   Harvard, however, will hardly be the same. Bodies pile up, torture scenes (with pliers) abound — and, you might ask — for what?

   Successful combinations of comedy, blood and suspense can be done. They are a specialty of the Mr. Hitchcock previously referred to. Gifford can weave a nasty spell with words, but the enormous improbability of such a sequence of events, given the timetable suggested, drags the early part of the story into a morass of page-flipping, and the jagged abruptness with which it’s all wrapped up only points out the lack of solid substance throughout.

   Nothing is gained. Pessimistically a number of lives are lost, and the pretense that it’s all in good fun can’t be maintained forever.

   Definitely written with the movies in mind, and it could very well make a good one. It’s flashy and glib, and the weaknesses in the foundation can be easily overlooked. After the end of the book is reached — and believe me, once started, you most definitely will — that’s when the sugar-coating will be recognized, alas, for what it is.

   Artificial, that is, and not altogether satisfying.

Bibliography —     

      The Wind Chill Factor, Putnam, 1975.
      The Cavanaugh Quest, Putnam, 1976. (Nominated for the Edgar Award, Best Novel, 1977.)

      The Man from Lisbon, McGraw, 1977.
      The Glendower Legacy, Putnam, 1978.
      Hollywood Gothic, Putnam, 1979.
      The Assassini, Bantam, 1990.
      Praetorian, Bantam, 1993.
      The First Sacrifice, Bantam, 1994.
      Saint’s Rest, Bantam, 1996.

as Thomas Maxwell —

      Kiss Me Once, Mysterious Press, 1986.

      The Saberdene Variations, Mysterious Press, 1987.
      Kiss Me Twice, Mysterious Press, 1998.
      The Suspense Is Killing Me, Mysterious Press, 1990.

as Dana Clarins —

      Woman in the Window, Bantam, pbo, 1984.

      Guilty Parties, Bantam, pbo, 1985.
      The Woman Who Knew Too Much, Bantam, pbo, 1986.

[UPDATE] 06-14-09.   I mentioned The Wind Chill Factor in the opening paragraph, a reference that was more useful when this review first appeared, as the book is all but forgotten now.

   In fact August West reviewed it as just that not so long ago on his blog, as one of Patti Abbott’s “Friday Forgotten Books” project. It’s a spy thriller that starts out in Minnesota, but it quickly goes international with a stirred-up nest of neo-Nazis.

   I reviewed it myself back when it first came out, and one of these days I’ll come across it again, so maybe my review (also positive) will show up here some day as well.

   I wrote this review a few years before the movie I predicted did come out, and of course I was right about that, but I was wrong about who the stars were going to be.

   The movie was called Dirty Tricks — and are you ready for this? — the stars were Elliott Gould and Kate Jackson. Passable choices, perhaps, but they were never to be confused with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and the inclusion of Rich Little as one of the players shows what the primary thrust of the movie was.

   I’ve not seen it myself, but its rating on IMDB is 4.4 out of 10, which is Not Very Good.

JOHN JAKES – A Night for Treason. Charter; reprint paperback, circa 1980. Hardcover edition, Mystery House (Bouregy & Curl), 1956. Other paperback editions: Ace Double D-209, 1957; Tor/Pinnacle, 1981.

   In the mid-70s, around the time of the American Bicentennial, John Jakes struck a pan of gold and became famous (perhaps even wealthy) for his Kent Family Chronicles and other works of early colonial and frontier America.

   Before then he was only a journeyman author, writing science fiction and fantasy (Brak the Barbarian, among others), mysteries (the Johnny Havoc series, among still more others) and generally speaking, whatever would sell.

   This is clearly one of his early efforts, and the only way it was reprinted some 25 years later is that someone was convinced that his name on a book would sell the book. In theory at least. It doesn’t turn up in used book stores all that often, and I don’t think it’s because it’s being held onto by scores of discriminating collectors.

   Quoting from the front cover: “G-Man Max Ryan’s assignment is to infiltrate the sinister European Combine in this vintage espionage thriller,” and from the first page on you know it’s the purest sort of pulp fiction writing at its finest. By which I definitely do not mean Bad, but on the other hand, it’s not necessarily a compliment, either:

    “Max Ryan drained the last of his coffee and placed the cup on the counter. His palms had started to sweat. He would have to do it soon, now… Max followed Gib out of the small roadside diner. The semi-trailer hulked like a giant animal on the shoulder of the turnpike. The sky was dark and cold with a pre-dawn chill. Few automobiles moved on the long stretch of highway, far apart.”

   Even though the events are intended to be earth-shattering, the scope is strictly small scale, constricted in budget in the same way the old black-and-white second features at the movies were, back in the 50s.

   A lot of the early action takes place in and around the Coco Club, for example, with a secret mastermind known only by his voice over the telephone orchestrating the nefarious criminal activities of the two or three henchmen he has under his control.

   There is a surprise in store for Max on page 163, and it stunned me as well, at least at first. Given a chance to sit back down and think about it, my second reaction was probably closer to disbelief. You might respond the same way, but on the other hand, now that I’ve read the book and told you about it, think of it this way: you might not need to.

[UPDATE] 06-12-09.   Up until getting this review ready to be posted, I was blissfully unaware of the other two paperback editions of this book. I should have remembered that it once was half an Ace Double, since I’ve been collecting them for over 40 years, but for some reason I can’t explain, I didn’t. Shame on me.