MR. MOTO’S LAST WARNING. 20th Century-Fox, 1939. Peter Lorre, Ricardo Cortez, Virginia Field, John Carradine, George Sanders. Based on the character created by John P. Marquand. Screenwriters; Philip MacDonald and Norman Foster. Director: Norman Foster.

   I’m told that Mr. Moto’s Last Warning, the sixth of eight Mr. Moto films – see below – is the only one that’s in the public domain. This explains two things. First, why I was able to buy a copy on DVD at this evening’s local library sale for only $2.00, and secondly why I paid too much, as I discovered later: You can watch the entire movie for free online. Click here.

   Disclaimer: I have not watched the free version all the way through, but it appears that it’s the entire film that’s available.

   Here’s a complete list of the Mr. Moto films:

         * Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937)
         * Thank You, Mr. Moto (1937)
         * Mr. Moto’s Gamble (1937)
         * Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (1938)
         * Mysterious Mr. Moto (1938)
         * Mr. Moto’s Last Warning (1939)
         * Danger Island (1939)
         * Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation (1939)

   As you see Peter Lorre and 20th Century-Fox stopped making them well before the US became involved in World War II, a wisely-taken cautionary move, as by nationality, Mr. Moto was very definitely Japanese. By profession, he was a secret agent for the “International Police,” and since he was very proficient in either judo or ju jistsu (I imagine there’s a difference) his movies were a lot more action-oriented than either Mr. Chan’s or Mr. Wong’s.

   Exemplified quite well, thank you, by Mr. Moto’s Last Warning, in which any number of people are killed or very nearly so, including (surprisingly enough) some of the good guys, one in rather gruesome fashion. Because of a partially muffled sound track at the beginning, it took me a while to figure out what the story was about, but eventually all became clear, except for one question: what country were the bad guys (Cortez and Sanders, primarily) working for? Forthrightly, it is never stated.

   Scene: Port Said, Egypt. Plot: To create an incident involving the incoming French fleet that will break the bonds of friendship between France and England. Mr. Moto, working undercover as an antiques dealer, gets wind of the plans and sends out the warning that’s stated in the title.

   The movie is surprisingly well done. The actors are all pros at this sort of game, the script makes sense (not surprisingly, considering the hand of Philip MacDonald at the helm), and the comedic interludes are only a trifle overdone.

   For the most part, the story takes itself seriously. I especially liked the bad girl to good girl transformation of Virginia Field as Connie, lover of Fabian (Ricardo Cortez), the ventriloquist (yes) behind the entire scheme.

   That’s her in the lower right corner of the lobby card, the best I’ve been able to come up with. I’m also not sure how well the Peter Lorre image will come out. It looks not quite in focus to me, but it’s the best I can offer so far. Coming directly from the film, I think it should give you a better idea of how he appears in the movie, as compared to the DVD box or even the lobby card.

JOHN GARDNER – Understrike.

Corgi; UK paperback reprint, 1966. Hardcover editions: Muller, UK, 1965; Viking, US, 1965. US paperback reprint: Fawcett Crest d1126, 1968

   I didn’t purchase too many paperbacks at last weekend’s Windy City show, and only four pulp magazines. Most of the paperbacks I bought came from one dealer very early on, the lot consisting of British espionage thrillers from the 1960s and 70s and written by authors such as James Leasor, James Mayo, Colin Forbes, Alan Williams and so on, all of them pretty much hard to find in this country.

   The author most highly represented in this assortment was perhaps also the one most known in the US, John Gardner, his reputation here most likely based on the James Bond books he wrote in 1980s and early 90s. For a complete checklist of his novels and story collections, see Jim Doherty’s obituary for him here when he died in August 2007.

      Gardner’s earlier series character was a fellow by the name of Boysie Oakes, a most reluctant spy extraordinaire, and I’ll get back to him in a moment. First, however, here’s a chronological list of the novel length fiction that he appeared in:

BOYSIE OAKES – The Novels.

      o The Liquidator. Muller, 1964; Viking, 1964. US pb: Fawcett Crest d856, 1965.

      o Understrike. Muller, 1965; Viking, 1965. US pb: Crest, 1968.
      o Amber Nine. Muller. 1966; Viking, 1966. US pb: Crest R1173, 1968.
      o Madrigal. Muller, 1967; Viking, 1968. US pb: Berkley, 1969.
      o Founder Member. Muller, 1969. No US edition.
      o Traitor’s Exit. Muller, 1970. No US edition.
      o The Airline Pirates. Hodder, 1970; U.S. title: Air Apparent, Putnam, 1971. US pb: Berkley, 1973.
      o A Killer for a Song. Hodder, 1975. No US edition.

   The first of these was made into a film starring Rod Taylor as Boysie, and Jill St. John as his leading lady. The comments on IMDB are fairly positive, and in fact Variety says “Peter Yeldham’s screenplay and Jack Cardiff’s direction combine plenty of action and some crisp wisecracking,” but it doesn’t appear to be available on DVD. I’ll have to see if I can’t track down a copy, maybe on VHS.

   The gimmick in the Boysie Oakes books, as I alluded to earlier, is that as a spy, he’s supposedly inept, a coward who’s wracked with fear and stomach cramps at the thought of confronting the enemy, and a consummate womanizer. Or in other words, the direct opposite of Bond, save maybe the last category, although Bond usually stuck to one girl per book (didn’t he?). In Understrike, Oakes strikes up dalliances with two, neither being Elizabeth, his girl friend back home.

   It must be a British thing, the sense of humor that enjoys spoofs like this, as there never was a second movie, and many of the books never had US editions. I read The Liquidator, the first in the series, long ago, so I’m relying only on the book at hand, Understrike, and no, the book didn’t quite jell with me, either.

   Oakes is a pitiful creature on one page, then (sometimes accidentally) fully capable and in charge on the next. Not having read the first one in so long, it was also never clear to me how he became a secret agent in the first place. It doesn’t seem as though it would to be a position that he’d actively seek out. There’s a story there, obviously, but without it being told in this second tale, there’s something actively missing.

   Plot line: The Russian spy apparatus has created an exact double of Boysie, down to the fear and cowardice, as it turns out, with a switch planned to be made shortly before a demonstration of a new US submarine missile off the coast of San Diego, a show of rocket power that Boysie is traveling (under some duress) across country to attend and bear witness to.

   Much hilarity is intended to follow, which sounds more sarcastic than I mean to be, but it’s a dry hilarity, British-style, and I do not mean Benny Hill, even though one hugely fortuitous bedroom switch has a large role in the proceeding. Let’s put it this way. I smiled a lot, but I did not burst out loud in guffaws.

PHANTOM LADY. Universal; 1944. Ella Raines, Franchot Tone, Alan Curtis, Elisha Cook Jr., Thomas Gomez, Fay Helm. Based on the novel by William Irish, aka Cornell Woolrich. Director: Robert Sidomak.

   You don’t go to pulp or paperback conventions to see movies, or at least I don’t, but I did this time. The recent Windy City show was great fun – well put on, with lots of people to talk to and hang around with for a few days – and one of the late night attractions was a showing of Phantom Lady, the pulp connection being rather obvious, since Woolrich’s writing career began in the pulp magazines.

   First published by Lippincott in 1942, it’s the second novel that Woolrich wrote that I remember reading, the first being Deadline at Dawn (Lippincott, 1944) also as by William Irish, and also made into a movie (RKO, 1946), one that I consider as being my favorite of all time.

   What’s strange, and I haven’t been able to explain it yet, is that I thought I remembered Phantom Lady as a movie, but if I saw it, and I’m sure I did, I didn’t remember it all that well.

   It was shown at the Windy City show in a two reel format, and while all was well during the first reel – everything came back to me, pretty much as I expected – but when the second reel began, I discovered that I didn’t remember any of it at all. A severe case of déjà vue in reverse, you might say. The second reel began, if I recall correctly, as Carol Richman (Ella Raines), trying to break the testimony of the witnesses who claim they never saw the woman who is her boss’s alibi, begins the long sequence in which she tries to vamp jazz drummer Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook Jr.) into telling the truth.

   I’ve found some photos to go with this, as these are the scenes that everyone talks about when the movie comes up for discussion, and I’ll include some of them here. Not only that, but I’ve found the entire sequence on YouTube. Here’s the link. (I’ve never been able to insert videos into this blog, but maybe it’s time to try again.)

   I’m of two minds about this portion of the movie, and the larger part of me wants to tell you that I think it’s silly and overdone. (I assume that you’ve gone to see for yourself and have made up your own mind.) And that may be the reason I don’t remember ever seeing it before last Friday night. Or maybe I never saw the movie before at all, and I just thought I had. It is an eerie feeling, and I can’t explain it.

   You probably know the story, and let me sort of start over and get back to that. A man, Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis), who (as it turns out) has had an argument with his wife, shows up at a bar and offers to take a sad-looking lady her meets there to a Broadway musical. He has two tickets, but no one to go with. She accepts, but only on a “no names” basis.

   He drops her off after the show, goes home, and finds three cops waiting for him, with his wife dead in the bedroom. His alibi? The phantom lady, the one with the hat, the lady that no one remembers ever seeing. One of the only ones who believes him is his secretary-assistant, Carol “Kansas” Richmond.

   Pure nightmare, and pure noir. If I remember correctly, the first reel ended with Carol stalking the bartender through the darkened Manhattan streets, beginning with her first giving him the long silent treatment at the far end of the bar, then up to a elevated train station, and down again to a street farther downtown where she finally confronts him. It is, of course, the skilled black-and-white photography that makes this work, portraying a world of dark shadows and the feeling of helplessness in fine fashion.

   What doesn’t work in this movie, to my mind, are the gaping holes in the plot – there are so many I couldn’t begin to list them all, and I probably shouldn’t anyway – and the fact that the true killer is revealed too soon. I’m not sure if this is true in the book or not, as once again I have not read it in well over 50 years, but a lot of the puzzle is immediately swept away in the movie version. The only question left is how is he to be caught, and of course, he is. (I don’t believe I am giving anything away here.)

   In the credits, Franchot Tone’s name is listed first, but since he doesn’t show up until the movie’s well over half over, I’ve switched his name above with Ella Raines, a dark brooding brunette (in this movie, at least). This was only her third film, and she’s the star attraction, all the way. For whatever reason, roles in future flicks seemed to come few and far between, a waste of good talent, as far as I can see.

   Alan Curtis is fine enough as the accused killer, an engineer with designs of helping mankind, but in all truthfulness, he seems far too resigned to his fate, nor does he realize how much his secretary is secretly in love with him. A true cipher, but the scenes in the jail between the two of them are beautifully done.

   Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York Times seems to sum up all of the negative things I also might tell you about myself. He deserves credit for pointing the atmospheric effects, but how was he to know that later on this would be considered by many to be one of the gems of early film noir?

   It is, but I have to warn you, I think he’s still largely right. This movie is a diamond in the rough, one designed for a small (or even large) sense of suspended disbelief. I still think Deadline at Dawn is the better film, but after the showing in Windy City, I seemed to be alone in that belief. I’ll have to watch it again, but do you know what? I’m almost afraid to.

FOOTNOTE: The phantom lady’s name is Miss Terry. How appropriate is that?

SARAH SHANKMAN – I Still Miss My Man But My Aim Is Getting Better.

Pocket, paperback reprint; first printing, July 1997. Hardcover edition: Pocket, April 1996.

   First of all, as you just might possibly have guessed, this is a novel about the Nashville country music business, and I’ll get back to that in a minute. Secondly, it is not one of the books in Sarah Shankman’s series of mystery novels about Samantha Adams, a “cynical crime journalist for the Atlanta Constitution,” says one reviewer of the books. I wish I knew more about them, but I don’t.

   For some reason, the series books were begun under another name. See the list below, expanded slightly from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

SARAH SHANKMAN. ca.1943- . Pseudonym: Alice Storey.
      Impersonal Attractions (n.) St. Martin’s 1985 [San Francisco, CA]
      Now Let’s Talk of Graves (n.) Pocket Books 1990 [Samantha Adams; New Orleans, LA]
      She Walks in Beauty (n.) Pocket Books 1991 [Samantha Adams; New Jersey]
      The King Is Dead (n.) Pocket Books 1992 [Samantha Adams; Mississippi]
      He Was Her Man (n.) Pocket Books 1993 [Samantha Adams; Arkansas]
      I Still Miss My Man, But My Aim Is Getting Better (n.) Pocket Books 1996 [Nashville, TN]
      Digging Up Momma (n.) Pocket Books 1998 [Samantha Adams; Santa Fe, NM]

STOREY, ALICE. Pseudonym of Sarah Shankman.
      First Kill All the Lawyers (n.) Pocket Books 1988 [Samantha Adams; Atlanta, GA]
      Then Hang All the Liars (n.) Pocket Books 1989 [Samantha Adams; Atlanta, GA]

SARAH SHANKMAN, Editor –
      A Confederacy of Crime: New Stories of Southern-Style Mystery. Signet, pb, 2001. [A partial list of authors: Jeffery Deaver, Margaret Maron, Joan Hess, Julie Smith, Sarah Shankman.]

      If Sarah Shankman has written any mysteries later than these, I’ve not discovered them, and so, I’m presuming, Samantha Adams’s crime-solving days are also over. Alas, I’ve not read any of them, but I think I shall.

      Not that I imagine any of the Adams books will be anything like I Still Miss My Man, a madcap romp that I can compare to anything I’ve ever read before. The nominal star is Shelby Kay Tate, who’s trying to make a name for herself as a singer-songwriter in Nashville. Little does she know that her ex-husband Leroy is bound and determined to get her back, even if he has to kill her to do so.

      Also little does she know that the policeman who comes to a domestic squabble with herself in the middle of it, Jeff Wayne Capshew, will appoint himself her permanent bodyguard, whether she approves of it or not. (And somewhat secretly to herself, she admits that maybe, just maybe, she might.)

      Also little does she know that a former country music great, Gail Powell, in secluded retirement for over 30 years, will see in her the means for a comeback. And least of all does she know, having been born at exactly the same second that Patsy Cline died. That a guardian angel has been watching over her ever since, pushing and prodding events to come together at one time and one place, in this solid ode to honky-tonks and Nashville bars and doughnut shops, and the agony of waiting to be discovered, from a (mostly) female point of view.

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR. 1999. Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo, Denis Leary, Ben Gazzara, Faye Dunaway. Director: John McTiernan.

   A remake, of course, of the film with the same title that starred Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in 1968. To most critics, the remake suffered in comparison, but except for a few plot holes, but major ones, I liked this more recent version just fine. Of course, while my wife Judy says we saw the earlier film when it came out, I don’t remember it at all, for whatever that’s worth. (The link leads to Roger Ebert’s online review. Even when I don’t agree with him, I find myself nodding my head as I read his work, agreeing with every word he says.)

   As a matter of fact, I’ve just watched this more recent version twice. Over the period of three evenings I watched it once all the way through, and then, split over the last two nights, I watched it again with the director’s voice-over commentary turned on.

   Which I found fascinating. The technical terms are beyond me, what with dolly shots and so on, the former apparently an all-but-forgotten skill, with impressive results, but as he goes along McTiernan also points out little bits and pieces which he realizes that the audience doesn’t really grasp the significance of as they’re watching, including me, but which (perhaps subliminally) begin to add up and start them thinking in the right direction. (Or later on to say, aha, that’s what that was all about.)

   Story line: fabulously wealthy financier Thomas Crown (Brosnan) steals in elaborate fashion a valuable painting by Monet from an unnamed Manhattan Museum of Art. Immediately on the case is Catherine Banning, insurance investigator, tough as nails and all woman (Russo). Her instincts are also immediately on target, as she picks Crown for the crime the first day she’s on the job.

   She confronts him directly, in violation of all standard police procedure, and thus the game begins. Denis Leary plays the role of Detective Michael McCann, and even though he’s obviously attracted to her, all he can do is stand back and watch the sparks spy.

   You have to take the point of view of view, as the script strongly suggests, that stealing works of art is only a prank, a jest, and teasing the cops is all part of the fun. In that sense it’s Brosnan and Russo’s movie all the way, with lots of smooth, colorful photography to illustrate the lives of the rich and the semi-famous. (Detective McCann, in contrast, lives alone, in a dumpy apartment with a TV on the kitchen table. He’s a good sort, though, not jealous – well, maybe just a little, but what can he do?)

   At the time the movie played in the theaters, there was a great to-do about Miss Russo’s nude scenes, with a lot made of the fact that she was 45 at the time. Rightfully so. She is also a very good actress, having plenty of opportunity to demonstrate both her repertoire of facial expressions and fully clothed body language.

   Faye Dunaway, from the first movie, has an extended cameo role as Crown’s psychiatrist, giving Pierce Brosnan, as the man on the couch, plenty of opportunity to look reflective and puzzled about his own thoughts and behavior. Nonetheless, Miss Russo, who seems to grow softer and more feminine as the movie goes on, shows a bit more range. Even her ever-changing hair-styles are expressive.

SLOW BURN. 1986. Made for Cable TV (Showtime). Eric Roberts, Beverly D’Angelo, Raymond J. Berry, Emily Longstreth, Johnny Depp, Henry Gibson. Based on the novel Castles Burning, by Arthur Lyons. Screenwriter/director: Matthew Chapman.

If it hadn’t been for Arthur Lyons’ recent passing, reported here a few weeks ago, I might have never heard of this movie. It’s based on the fifth of eleven private eye novels that Lyon wrote, all of them cases for Jacob Asch, a former reporter who went to jail rather than reveal his sources.

Asch is portrayed by Eric Roberts in this movie. He was 30 at the time, and in the movie he looks younger, a lot younger, or maybe he only acts that way. Of course it may simply be a matter of perspective. In 1986 I was a lot younger, too, but that was then, and this is now.

Nonetheless, I still think of Jacob Asch as being a much older fellow.

A brief explanation is inserted here. This post originally included photo images of both Eric Roberts and Beverly D’Angelo, but unfortunately neither of them came from the movie itself, and I’ve deleted them. At first I thought they were close, but the more I thought about it, the less close and less appropriate they became. I had found a small photo of Johnny Depp that was taken from the film, as was one of Emily Longstreth, both seen below.

But neither of these two are the lead players, so I kept hunting. What I found is even better: a online video of the trailer for the film. Click here. You may have to sit through a short commercial first, but I think it’ll be worth the wait.

The appearance of Johnny Depp in this film came before he was known for much of anything. He was 23 at the time and playing a high school student of perhaps 18, perhaps he was guilty of pushing it a little the other way. His girl friend, Pam Draper, played by Emily Longstreth, I do not have a year of birth for, but she acts a lot older (and sexier) than a teen-aged girl is supposed to be — she is dating an older man, for example, and later on, she dares Asch to take advantage of her. Wisely, he refuses. If you’re looking to spice things up, Just Dildos offers a wide selection of products to enhance your intimate experiences.

In part that may be because he has already become infatuated with Laine Fleischer (Beverly D’Angelo), the mother of the boy he was hired to locate. Perhaps now is a good time for me to back up. A famous artist named McMurtry (Raymond J. Berry) has asked Asch to find his son, regretting now having abandoned both the boy and his mother (Laine) some 10 years earlier. Laine has now remarried, and as Asch discovers, her son has been killed in an auto accident. Donnie (played by Johnny Depp) is her stepson.

Laine is a slim seductive blue-eyed blonde with many secrets, and it is fascination at first sight, or at least it is in one direction, from Asch’s point of view. But the story really begins when McMurtry learns that his son is dead. He goes crazy, and before the night is over, Donnie has been kidnapped. The play of events that caused these seems obvious to everyone, but obvious never is the case in cases like this.

The movie is has its flaws — it sometimes moves too slowly, and the voice-over narration at times could at best be called trite — but the Palm Springs background and the way the rich people live there, in contrast to the local cops and the local kids, not all of whom have rich parents and some of whom do not have parents who love them enough, provide a setting and theme that thoroughly caught my attention, at least.

There is a scene at the end which is pure noir, and once you’ve seen it, you realize that even though the movie was filmed in color, it had been a noir all the way through. There are other scenes which are even finer. Even though this is only a slightly above average movie (my opinion), some of these scenes I’ll remember for quite a while. (Only one, maybe two at the most are in the trailer.)

And do you know what? The longer I sit here at the computer keyboard, the better I remember liking this movie. A lot.

ROBERT CRANE – The Sergeant and the Queen.

Pyramid R-1012; paperback original. First printing: May 1964.

   Some information about the author first, shall we? He’s not a name known to me, nor is this a book I bought in 1964, even though I bought a lot of Pyramid’s back then. But from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, comes the following:

CRANE, ROBERT; pseudonym of Con Sellers, (1922-1992); other pseudonyms Ric Arana & Ladd E. Linsley.

      Sgt. Corbin’s War. Pyramid, 1964. [Ben Corbin; Korea]
      # The Sergeant and the Queen. Pyramid, 1964. [Ben Corbin; Korea]
      Operation Vengeance. Pyramid, 1965. [Ben Corbin; Tokyo]
      Strikeback! Pyramid, 1965. [Korea]
      # The Paradise Trap. Pyramid, 1967. [Ben Corbin; Hawaii]

      # Tongue of Treason. Pyramid, 1967. [Ben Corbin; California]
      Time Running Out. Papillon, 1974. [Ben Corbin; Tokyo]
      Out of Time. Decade, 1980; reprint of Time Running Out (Papillon 1974).

SELLERS, CON(nie Leslie, Jr.) (1922-1992); see pseudonyms Ric Arana, Robert Crane & Ladd E. Linsley.

      The Algerian Incident. Powell, 1970. [Algeria]

ARANA, RIC; pseudonym of Con Sellers, (1922-1992); other pseudonyms Robert Crane & Ladd E. Linsley.

      The Silent Seducers. Challenge, 1967.
      Big Dano. Powell, 1969. [California]

LINSLEY, LADD E.; pseudonym of Con Sellers, (1922-1992); other pseudonyms Ric Arana & Robert Crane.

      Widow for Hire. Powell, 1969.

   The books I own are the ones with indicated with a #. I thought I had a large paperback collection, and I am not greatly impressed at how low the percentage is of these that I have. There is obviously some work to be done by me as far as Mr. Sellers’ books are considered. (I also do not recall ever have seen a book published by Decade. This is something else that will have to be looked into.)

   From Contemporary Authors comes a partial list of more fiction (I think), but none of them crime related. These, unless indicated otherwise, are under his own name:

F.S.C.: The Shocking Story of a Probable America, Novel Books, 1963.
Too Late the Hero, Pyramid Books, 1970.
Dallas (novel adapted from the TV series), Dell, 1978. (Under the pseudonym of Lee Raintree.)

Bed of Strangers, Dell, 1978. (With Anthony Wilson)
Marilee, Pocket Books, 1978.
Sweet Caroline, Pocket Books, 1979.
The Last Flower, Pocket Books, 1979.
Since You’ve Been Gone, Jove Books, 1980.
Keepers of the House, Pocket Books, 1983.

This Promised Earth, Bantam, 1985.
The Black Magnolia, Bantam, 1986.
Trouble in Mind, Bantam, 1986.
Mansei!, Bantam, 1987.
Those Frightened Years, Bantam, 1988.
Brothers in Battle, Pocket Books, 1989.
“Men at Arms” series, four books, Pocket Books, 1991-1992.

   CA also says: “Con Sellers was a prolific writer who produced over 100 novels under a wide range of pseudonyms, including Robert Crane and Lee Raintree. His subjects ranged from pornography to romance, science fiction to war.”

   Mr. Sellers is also quoted thusly: “The most important step in my career was finding my agent, Jane Rotrosen Berkey. Until she took me in hand, I had never gotten more than $3,000 advance; now we talk $100,000.”

   Nice work, and not bad, considering he started with Novel Books, the lowest of the lows, but if his work sold, which it appears it did, he was worth every cent of it. Before turning to writing, using the GI bill as a stepping stone, he was in the military with the U.S. Army from 1940 to 1956; earned more than forty awards, including French Croix de Guerre with Palm, Bronze Star, Combat Infantry Badge with Star, and Purple Heart.

   I thought Sellers’s army service was worth a mention, if only because The Sergeant and the Queen could have been written only by someone in the army, someone who’s been there, knows what it’s like to give orders, take orders, and what it’s like to fight along those who are not ready to be there — kids in a man’s army. This latter theme resonates clearly throughout the book.

   The plot of which is rather slim, to say the least. A word first about Ben Corbin, though. I’ve not read the first book he was in, obviously, since I don’t have a copy, but there’s little need to, since his life story is thoroughly gone over in this one. Born in Korea, the son of a fire-and-brimstone Christian minister to that country, Ben Corbin turned instead to the military rather than religion for his own life’s work. Marrying a Korean woman was also what helped turn his life around, transforming him into one of that country’s greatest heroes — with most of his feats accomplished while deeply undercover — a man of legendary fighting abilities, and all aimed to the good of his adopted land.

   The plan in The Sergeant and the Queen, on the part of Corbin and a handful of others, is to bring in the granddaughter of the last empress of Korea to unite the country, a land torn through the middle after the conflict involving China and the UN, and still very much on edge. What the conspirators do not plan on, however, is how greatly attractive Helen Min finds Ben Corbin to be, and even though he is happily married, how little he is able to resist.

   Corbin fights many personal battles in this book, and whenever he does, the book’s forward motion slows to a near crawl. Those who bought this book in 1964 for the action will have found it — when aroused, Ben Corbin is a veritable one-man army, there’s no denying that. But I wonder what they made of the book’s true strength, the portrayal of a man fighting himself, the memories of his father, and a woman who seems to have her way with him, much of it through his own badly conflicted thoughts and emotions.

   A surprising book, in other words, and one not at all what I expected. A minor if not negligible book in the overall scheme of things, but on its own terms? Five stars out of five.

JONATHAN STAGGE – Death, My Darling Daughters.

Unicorn Book Club; hardcover reprint, June 1946. Hardcover first edition: Doubleday Crime Club, 1945. UK hardcover: Michael Joseph, as Death and the Dear Girls, 1946. Digest paperback reprint: Bestseller Mystery #B164; no date stated but circa 1953.

   Most of my time this week has been spent on doing my taxes, which are now done, at last. In the meantime, I’ve posted some old reviews to keep you from stopping by and seeing nothing new. I haven’t chosen the last two at random, though. I had a small design in mind, with no further explanation. I’ll let you put two and two together on your own.

   Jonathan Stagge was the author of nine mysteries published under Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint between 1937 and 1949. Each of these book featuring a country doctor by the name of Dr. Hugh Westlake as their leading sleuth. A widower, he lived with his daughter Dawn, who had only incidental roles in the cases he solved — I think. Maybe I’m wrong on that, as I’ve only read two or three of them, and none toward the end of the series, where she may have not appeared at all. And in some of the earlier ones, read a long time ago, she may have had more a part to play than she does in Death, My Darling Daughters.

   If you’ve been following me as I’ve gone along, however, you won’t be surprised to learn that Jonathan Stagge was a pen name and not a real person. He was instead the writing combo of Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler, who also wrote at various times as Patrick Quentin and Q. Patrick. (Later on in his career, Wheeler co-wrote a play with Stephen Sondheim called Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I didn’t know that, until just now.)

   It’s not clear how old Dawn is when the book at hand begins. Westlake calls her “my young daughter,” and mentions that he had moved with her to the small Massachusetts town of Kenmore after his wife’s death ten years earlier. Dawn is therefore old enough to be left alone in their home for long periods of time, but young enough to naively point out (and strongly suggest) women who might make good wives for him.

   New in town, or rather newly back in town, is the family descended of one of Kenmore’s more famous citizens, Benjamin Hilton, who at one time was the Vice President of United States. (One of the more obscure ones, you may be sure.) Dawn is the reason that Dr. Westlake gets to meet the family, a mother and two daughters, all rather standoffish from the rest of the town’s inhabitants, but it’s the death of their aged nanny that gets him involved with their problems in his other capacity of town coroner.

   And when the other branches of the family come to visit, both headed by famous research doctors, it is Inspector Cobb, whom Westlake has assisted before, who asks him to stay underfoot and see what he can learn. They suspect murder, but the local D.A. is wisely afraid of annoying such important people.

   And when a second death occurs, they know they’re right, and the D.A. wrong. There is a sense of slyly malicious humor involved in Stagge’s telling of the tale, but even though this is nearly the equivalent of English manor house mystery, with only a very few suspects living together under one roof, the fact is that the people are all very unlikeable. (Some more than others.)

   It slows the reading down, this small fact does, but it is important. The daughters, both in their late teens or early 20s, have been sexually repressed by their mother, in the good old Puritan tradition. Nor are their aunts of much assistance, both rather weak and futile creatures. The two men in the family are greedy and overbearing, along with any other faults that you think might apply to the stuffy male aristocracy of New England.

   Dr. Westlake has the very desirable trait of allowing nearly perfect strangers tell him their life histories, which certainly eases the way when his sleuthing hat is on. Nonetheless, as the book begins to close, and you (the reader) are starting to wonder if there is any real puzzle to be solved, the answer I’m going to be ambiguous and say only that persevering to the end usually pays off.

   Overall? There are some dull spots in the reading — and looking back, I can’t see any way the author could have avoided them, or not easily — but there’s enough solid substance here to give the book a thumbs up. But two of them? I’ve thought it over, and the answer is no, as much I’d like to, I just can’t do it.

[ADDED LATER.] Using Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV as a guide, here’s a list of all the Jonathan Stagge books, in chronological order:

      The Dogs Do Bark. Doubleday 1937 [Dr. Hugh Westlake; Pennsylvania]
      Murder by Prescription. Doubleday 1938 [Dr. Hugh Westlake; Pennsylvania]
      The Stars Spell Death. Doubleday 1939 [Dr. Hugh Westlake; Pennsylvania]
      Turn of the Table. Doubleday 1940 [Dr. Hugh Westlake; Pennsylvania]

      The Yellow Taxi. Doubleday 1942 [Dr. Hugh Westlake; Pennsylvania]
      The Scarlet Circle. Doubleday 1943 [Dr. Hugh Westlake; New England]

      Death, My Darling Daughters. Doubleday 1945 [Dr. Hugh Westlake; Massachusetts]
      Death’s Old Sweet Song. Doubleday 1946 [Dr. Hugh Westlake; Massachusetts]
      The Three Fears. Doubleday 1949 [Dr. Hugh Westlake; Massachusetts]

Q. PATRICK – Return to the Scene.

Books, Inc.; hardcover reprint, March 1944. First edition: Simon & Schuster/Inner Sanctum, 1941. Paperback reprint: Popular Library #47, ca. 1945. Serialized previously in The American Weekly as “The Green Diary.”

   I don’t know how long this website will stay up, but it presently contains loads and loads of the beautiful (if not exquisite) artwork that filled the covers of The American Weekly in its heyday. While the examples are all from 1918-1943, the magazine, a Sunday newspaper supplement for the Hearst chain, continued on through the years until the title changed to Pictorial Living in 1963, then folded for good in 1966. (Information obtained from Phil Stephensen-Payne’s magnificent Magazine Data File website.)

   Which is not relevant to anything more than the fact that this novel by Q. Patrick first appeared there, nothing more, but you really ought to see those covers.

   (I couldn’t resist. The one shown here is from 1941, the artist Joe Little, and as you see, one of the authors who had a story in that issue was Max Brand.)

   As for Q. Patrick, there is no way I am going to try to completely untangle the web of real names that lie behind that pen name and that of Patrick Quentin (and Jonathan Stagge). Suffice it to say that Return to the Scene was the result of the primary two collaborators who used that pseudonym, Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler. On other Q. Patrick titles, Webb had as partners, at various times, Martha Mott Kelley and Mary Louise Aswell — pairwise, mind you, not in triple tandem.

   It is interesting to note that Mary Aswell’s two efforts with Webb took place in 1933 (S. S. Murder) and 1935 (The Grindle Nightmare), and her single solo effort did not appear until 1957 (Far to Go).

   As for Patrick Quentin (and Jonathan Stagge), we’ll leave any discussion of who they were (and when) for another time, but as well known as practitioners of the Golden Age variety of detection, none of the various aliases, nor their books, are very well known today.

   Nor of course is Quentin/Patrick alone in this category. The rise and fall in popularity of various authors over the years is a subject that is likely to come up often in these pages in the days to come. Why, for example, are Agatha Christie’s books so timeless, and Borders has nothing on the shelves by Ellery Queen or Erle Stanley Gardner, and only a handful of titles by Rex Stout? John D. MacDonald’s books may be in print, but only from Amazon. I’ve not seen them on any actual bookstore shelves, new, in quite a while.

   Not that answers are likely to be very forthcoming and/or definitive, but the question at least will be something that will turn up in one of these review/commentaries every once in a while.

   Case in point. Return to the Scene, by Q. Patrick. Is it a book very likely to be published today? Answer, possibly, but not by a major publisher. Maybe by a small independent publisher like the Rue Morgue Press, which specializes in reprinting classic (and obscure) mysteries from the Golden Age, of which Return to the Scene is obviously one — and if you have gotten this far into this (which eventually will turn into a review), you really should be supporting them, and if you aren’t, then shame on you — or one of those publishers that specializes in large print editions for libraries, under the obvious assumption that only older people who can’t see so well any more will have any interest in reading them any more.

   It starts out like a romance novel — this is now the review — with Kay Winyard rushing to back to Bermuda to stop her niece from marrying the man she once thought she was in love with, before she discovered what kind of man he was and walked out on him. And in her purse is her weapon, a diary. A very revealing diary written by the woman who did marry him, in spite of Kay’s warning, and who subsequently killed herself because of him.

   It very quickly becomes instead a murder mystery, however, and there is no surprise to learn who the victim is. The rich, the powerful Ivor Drake, who is soon also very dead. And with a huge house of possible suspects, all of whom (it is also quickly discovered) had reasons to wish him that way.

   The police investigate, and for one reason or another, no one tells them the truth. Alibis are created out of happenstance and convenience. Every one has their own package of facts that they do not wish to be known, and webs of intrigue and would-be (and only reluctantly admitted) love affairs make learning the complete truth next to impossible even for Kay, who is an insider, much less Major Clifford, the ultimate outsider.

   Here’s a long quote from pages 116-117. It begins with Terry talking to his sister, Elaine. Elaine is the girl whose marriage Kay came back to Bermuda to stop:

   Alliances are built, along with the stories the players tell the police, then collapse, and bit by bit the truth gets put together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Delicious! There are clues aplenty, and the alibis so spontaneously constructed eventually cannot stand up under the pressure, and they begin to fall apart. Not one of the alibis, as it happens, is any good.

   The ending is disappointing, a little, but this (it seems to me) is what almost always happens. The explanation is so mundane, so unworthy, so why-didn’t-I-think-of that, but only, you realize, in comparison to the mystery itself.

   Another problem is that when the victim is so dastardly as this one is, one hates to see anyone found guilty of the crime, although of course someone must be, and in the end, all of the pieces fit together. (At least without a careful re-reading, all the way through, they do.)

   Not a classic, but in the Golden Age, even the non-classics came close.

PostScript: A preliminary checklist of titles in the Books, Inc., line of Midnite Mysteries, of which this book is one, can be found by following the link provided.

RICHARD BURKE – The Frightened Pigeon.

Unicorn Mystery Book Club; hardcover reprint, June 1946. First Edition: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1944. Paperback reprint: Dell 204, mapback edition, 1947.

   Back when Victor Berch, Bill Pronzini and I did our annotated bibliography of the Ziff Davis line of Fingerprint Mysteries , we included a short profile of Richard Burke, which of course you should go read. Many of his books, we said, involved a Broadway private detective named Quinny Hite, but as it happens, this is not one of them. In fact The Frightened Pigeon takes the reader to another part of the world and (one imagines) another kind of mystery altogether.

   But first a word on the covers that are shown below, though, before getting down to details. This is, of course, the Dell mapback edition, not either of the other two, and in case you can’t make out the details, the map on the back is that of the city of Marseilles, which is where the last eighty percent of the story takes place.

   The setting of the first fifty pages is Paris, 1942, with the Germans solidly in control of the city. An American dancer named Valerie Bright is still there, however – the pigeon of the title – and very determined to stay non-political. From page 8, of the Unicorn edition:

    “Of course after the Axis had decided to include the United States in the war, she had regarded them as enemies, but there wasn’t anything personal about her feeling.”

   Her close male friend, Charles John Dillon, nicknamed “Ching,” is working closely with the French underground, however, and events, beginning with a stolen German diary, bound to be embarrassing if it falls into the wrong hands – as, for example, into Ching’s hands – soon make the light-hearted Val realize how dirty – and dangerous – war really is, not knowing what will happen next nor whom your friends really are. By page 40, she is one frightened pigeon indeed, as off to Marseilles they and a small group of displaced others go, hoping to find a way out of France and its closed borders.

   The diary appears and disappears with amazing regularity. It is, in fact, amazing, how much mileage an author (Burke) can make of one small important object. Otherwise here is a novel one can learn a large amount from – supposing, that is, that one has never been in a place controlled by Nazi-like enemies one is trying his or her best to avoid – both in term of locale (well-described) and people, especially those like Valerie, whose mind is soon brought down to earth in satisfying (but not very surprising) fashion, but also the large number of others who find themselves caught up in events far beyond their say.

   Don’t get me wrong. This is by no means a major work. It’s no more than ordinary at best, in the overall scheme of things, but what it does have is atmosphere, and plenty of it.