L A. CONFIDENTIAL. Unsold television pilot, 2003. Keifer Sutherland, Josh Hopkins, Melissa George, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Eric Roberts. Director: Eric Laneuville. Based on the novel by James Ellroy.

   Filmed in 1999, says IMDB, as part of a deal with HBO in 2000 as the first installment of a 13-part mini-series. When that didn’t happen, Fox took interest, but in the end, they also turned it down. Their loss, and ours.

   The date 2003, by the way, is when the cable network Trio finally aired it as part of a long marathon of similar bankrupt and cancelled projects.

   I’ve not read the book, which is number three in Ellroy’s series of 1950s L.A.-based novels: The Black Dahlia was the first; number two was The Big Nowhere; and the fourth was White Jazz. I’ve also not seen the full-length movie version of L. A. Confidential (1997), a huge gap or gaffe on my part (take your pick), but at least you can say that this review of the TV version is unbiased in terms of any sort of comparisons, or any other kind of useful information.

   This TV film, all that was ever made, is only 50 minutes long, and it ends with a large TO BE CONTINUED across the screen. Just as all of the pieces were coming together! Utter frustration.

   Keifer Sutherland, not yet a 24-carat star, is Det.-Sgt. Jack Vincennes in this one, the role played by Kevin Spacey in the film. Melissa George is would-be movie starlet Lynn Bracken, played by Kim Basinger in the movie. I could go on and on like this, but the TV version is not the same story as the earlier version (or so I’m told), but essentially a different (and ultimately longer) adaptation of the book, produced and created by men with different ideas, limitations and goals in mind.

   Basic story: Vincennes, having killed an innocent man during a drug bust gone bad, tries to make up for it by anonymously sending money to the dead man’s widow. This means that he needs more money than he makes, which means in turn that he has to go on the take. Not a good idea when Internal Affairs is watching, not to mention the editor and publisher of Hush Hush Magazine.

   The TV version is visually striking in color, but in terms of overall production values, I doubt that it holds up in that regard to the movie. Note to self: watch the movie, and report back.

[UPDATE]   I haven’t found any images to add to this review, but for as long as it’s there, you can watch this short pilot online in five parts, beginning with http://www.truveo.com/Part-1of-5-LA-Confidential-TV-pilot-Kiefer/id/1356656397

[UPDATE #2] 03-07-12. As suspected, the video above is no longer there. See the comments, though, for information as to how to find a copy.

URSULA CURTISS – Catch a Killer.

Pocket 940; 1st pr., June 1953. Hardcover edition: Dodd Mead, 1951, as The Noonday Devil.

   It’s my guess that every time one of Ursula Curtiss’s books is reviewed today, it begins with the observation that her mother was mystery writer Helen Reilly, and that her sister was mystery writer Mary McMullen. (And equally obviously, I’m no exception.)

   It must have been in the genes, but during the time when all three were actively writing (Reilly from 1930 to 1962; Curtiss from 1948 to 1985, with a posthumous collection of short stories; and McMullen from 1951 to 1986), do you suppose that anyone ever asked them what was in the water they were drinking?

   While Helen Reilly had a series detective who appeared in most of her books – Inspector McKee of Manhattan Homicide – Ursula Curtiss and Mary McMullen, from all I know, gained largely from reading about them, were heavy practitioners of (suburban?) domestic malice and/or romantic suspense, and neither of them used a repeating character in any of their books.

   For me, this is largely hearsay, especially as far as Curtiss is concerned, as this is the only book of hers I’ve read. So far. In any case, what you expect is not always what you get. In Catch a Killer, for example, I was surprised (although far from nonplussed) to discover that the leading character is male, and that the story begins in Manhattan. I had the uneasy feeling that I was leaning one way, and the book, with Curtiss in charge, was going another.

   In the second half of the book, the scene changes, however, and rather drastically. Under some pretext or another, all of the leading characters seem to find their way to the same small country town in New England, and when they do, everything seems to revert to normal. (By which I mean, closer to what was expected, if not anticipated.) And as a direct consequence, most probably with the characters’ closer proximity to each other, the action seems to pick up as well.

   The atmosphere is black, introspective and moody throughout. And as you well know, or you should, coincidences simply thrive in such climates – beginning as they do here, in Chapter One. When you walk into an unfamiliar bar for the first time, for example, you never know whom you’ll meet, and that’s where Andrew Sentry finds a man who’d been in the same Japanese prison camp as his brother Nick – an encounter occurring solely by chance.

   Nick had died in a subsequent attempt to escape, and his death, Andrew for the first time is now told, was no accident. There was an informer in the camp – someone Nick knew – who told their guards of Nick’s plans, which were then foiled. This is an unusual (if not unique) means of killing someone, but who was the mysterious man who called himself Sands? And what was his motive?

   More coincidences begin to pile up. Every male in Andrew’s small circle of friends and acquaintances suddenly seems to have been a Japanese prisoner in the Philippines at some time or another during the war. Nick’s fiancée Sarah Devany may have received a postcard in code from him just before he died, but when a simple question might have unraveled the mystery before it has even begun, there are barriers which by fate have carefully been laid in the way.

   When Andrew came to break the news of Nick’s death to Sarah, it is revealed, he found her kissing another man, and he has not spoken to her ever since. And since the case for murder is so flimsy, the police cannot be called in, which limits Andrew’s resources to himself and whoever he feels he can trust, the list of those in this category changing chapter by chapter.

   And in similar fashion does the reader’s grip on the story, or vice versa, the story’s grip on the reader. Excellent characterizations are mixed helter-skelter with a plot that’s held together with a strong, industrial brand of duct tape. Nonetheless, New England summer towns can be filled with as much malice as large population centers such as Manhattan, and the generally capable touch of Ursula Curtiss goes a long way in proving it.

[UPDATE] 02-13-08.   I read and reviewed this book four years ago, and do you think I remember it? If I hadn’t written this review, I don’t believe I would even have remembered reading it, if you’d asked me.

   But after reading and slightly revising the review, it all came back to me — everything, that is, except whodunit. I’m willing to wager that if I started to read the book again now, I still wouldn’t remember who the killer was.

   I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not.

   But in any case, I mentioned in the course of the review that this was the first mystery I’d read that Ursula Curtiss had written. It’s also still the only one, not through any fault of hers!

THE LONE WOLF IN PARIS. Columbia, 1938. Francis Lederer, Frances Drake, Walter Kingsford, Leona Maricle, Albert Dekker. Director: Albert S. Rogell. Based on the character created by Louis Joseph Vance.

   Michael Lanyard, also known as The Lone Wolf, appeared in eight novels written by Vance between 1914 and 1934; in 24 movies between 1917 and 1949; in a 1948 radio show on Mutual; and in a 1954-55 syndicated TV series. (I didn’t want you to think we were talking about any old fly-by-night sort of character here.)

   By the end, he was essentially a good guy, almost but not quite a private eye, I believe, but he didn’t start out that way. In the beginning he was a gentleman European jewel thief, pure and simple, but his penchant for helping beautiful women in distress eventually convinced him that working for the law instead of against not only had the advantage of being able to continue his narrow-escape adventures, but without the disadvantage of always having the police close behind his heels. At least theoretically, anyway.

   In The Lone Wolf in Paris, suave Czechoslovakian-born Francis Lederer’s only opportunity to play him, Lanyard is on the edge of reform. He has letters from heads of police departments from all over Europe to vouch for him, but the hapless manager of the Paris hotel where he is staying immediately has a suspect in hand when robberies begin taking place in several rooms of his establishment.

   In the hotel at the same time, it seems, are three rich members of Arvonne royalty, who between them have the crown jewels of their country. (Arvonne is a small country found somewhere on the map near France, we are led to believe.) Princess Thania (Frances Drake) desperately needs them back. Once the people of Arvonne learn that they are missing – a good deed gone bad – the Queen will be forced to abdicate.

   There is a lot of pleasant thievery and derring-do packing into the 66 minutes of this movie. There are also a few brief opportunities for romance between all of the switches back and forth between the real gems and fake ones made of paste. It’s a minor film, but a very enjoyable one nonetheless. The hour and change in running time goes by very quickly.

NEXT. 2007. Nicolas Cage, Jessica Biel, Julianne Moore; Peter Falk. Director: Lee Tamahori. Based on the short story “The Golden Man,” by Philip K. Dick.

   When I was growing up in the middle to late 1950s, my favorite SF author was Philip K. Dick. I was way ahead of my time, I think, because nobody I knew had ever heard of him. Then I learned of SF fandom, that would have been in the early 60s, and suddenly I wasn’t alone any more. He wasn’t everybody’s favorite author then, but in that crowd at least he was read, and his stories were talked about.

   And now, ever since the movie Blade Runner, I would imagine – I’m talking now 1982 – everybody who goes to the movies and pays attention to the authors that wrote the stories that movies are made of has heard of Philip K. Dick. He had ideas – many of them solidly paranoiac and/or hallucinogenic – ideas that no one ever had then and no one seems to have now, and often questioning the meaning of reality itself. Is the world a stage, our surrounding only sets? And so on and et cetera.

   The premise of Next is that its hero, an obscure and not very successful Las Vegas stage magician named Cris Johnson [Nicolas Cage], has the ability to see exactly two minutes into his future. Now you know and I know that this can’t be done, but given the premise, how might a man having such a ability deal with it? Superheroes, says Stan Lee, have great responsibilities. Is it not so?

   Cris Johnson tries to hide his behind the facade of his magic act, performing before small audiences in rundown clubs. So far, up to the time the movie begins, he has succeeded. But this is a crime film, a top notch action thriller – some of it choreographed so well that I had to stop the DVD, backtrack and watch it again. [Insert a small “heh” here.] The second premise at work is that a very sophisticated gang of terrorists going to set off a nuclear bomb somewhere in the Los Angeles area.

   It is difficult to know exactly what they hope to gain from this – or maybe it was explained and I missed it – but that’s OK. I have an imagination, and I can use it. It is federal agent Callie Ferriss’s job – she’s played by Julianne Moore – to convince Cris Johnson to use his ability to save the lives of eight million people. Cris Johnson is sympathetic, of course, but he knows that once he does, his life as he knows it is gone forever.

   Not only is this an action thriller, but it is also a romantic film. Jessica Biel – oh so beautiful, and he, Nicolas Cage, such a magnificent scarecrow of a man – plays Liz Cooper, and somehow she is part of Cris’s future. He knows it, and he doesn’t know how, but of course she is… Have you seen the previews? Should I tell you? No, but keep in mind that this is also an action thriller, and she is very much a part of the action…

   …as an innocent victim. I just simply have to tell you that. No one as young and innocent and beautiful as Liz Cooper is could be anything but an innocent victim in a movie.

   The men who made this film did an absolutely smashing job of making the first part of it, the first two or three acts or so. It could not have been easy task in figuring out ways to make the science-fictional premise understandable to mainstream audiences, but they did.

   Unfortunately premises such this one lead easily to all kinds of unanswered questions, and I will not bore you with mine, largely because I do not have answers to them. If you watch the movie, I suspect you will come up with as many of yours as I did, and there may not even be any overlap.

   There is another “unfortunately” coming up here in my comments on the film, and unfortunately I am running out of wind, if not space. And this one involves the ending. All movies have to have endings. I wish this one didn’t, in one sense, and in another, I wish it didn’t have the ending it has. I have the feeling that I am not alone in feeling this way.

   [LATER ON THE SAME DAY.]   I have been thinking the ending over, and feeling an inch (perhaps a foot but probably not a yard) more positive about it, I think I would like to revise my comments a bit, or add to them in this fashion. If I am right, and I now believe I am, the ending of the movie is really rather clever.

   I am naturally reluctant to say that I was wrong before, of course. The fact remains that for the kind of audience who would be most attracted to this movie, I am sure the ending will disappoint them greatly. Action-minded audiences do not enjoy being taken lightly.

   [EVEN LATER.]   I was right. After posting my comments, I went to read what some of the people on IMDB had to say. I didn’t get far. Here are three. You can go read the rest for yourselves.

    “I DON’T WANT TO IMAGINE A FILM, I WANT TO WATCH IT!!!!!”

    “I see 4-5 movies a month in a theater, but when Next ended tonight, it was the first time I’d ever heard a crowd ‘BOO’ a movie.”

    “This is the kind of movie that doesn’t seem so bad until you find out that there are people who actually liked it.”

WILLIAM R. COX – Death on Location. Signet S2158, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1962.

    It begins with a baseball game, the championship series of the Las Vegas Strip Baseball League, which if you think about it, sounds like a lot of fun. Besides being a reformed gambler, however, Tom Kincaid is a shoestring movie producer as well, and when he moves his crew upstate to start filming an adventure epic starring his live-in girl friend, he unknowingly carries the dirt of big city dope traffic with him.

    The detection is a flabby effort, to tell the truth. The solution to the murder of the leading lady’s stand-in seems to flop out of its hidey closet of its own accord, but the message is that the movie business is really just plain hard work. The logistics of making a movie are staggering, to put it mildly, and they’re put together by honest, industrious people. Under the sophistication, folks, they’re just like us.    (C)

   
[UPDATE] 02-11-08. Cox was another paperback writer in the 1950s and 60s who began his career in the pulps, writing mysteries like this one — I’m almost positive that Tom Kincaid appeared in his short stories long before he started showing up in full-length novels — but Cox wrote a ton of westerns and sports fiction as well. Short or long, magazine or paperback, it didn’t seem to matter. The only books he wrote that appeared in hardcover, though, while he was alive, were sports stories for boys, with titles like Trouble at Second Base and Rookie in the Back Court.

   When there was a lull in writing books and short stores, Cox did TV screenplays, shows like Bonanza, Wagon Train and Tales of Wells Fargo, but according to IMDB, an episode of Route 66 as well, among many others.

   There were a couple of interesting characters to be found in his western paperback fiction. First was a guy called Cemetery Jones, about whom I know little more than his name, and second, although this may not count, after William Ard died, Cox wrote a bunch of the “Buchanan” books under the Jonas Ward byline.

   Thanks to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, here’s a list of all of the Tom Kincaid novels. Someone else will have to help me out on the pulp stories Kincaid appeared in. I can’t find any reference to specific titles or dates, but I’m positive I’ve read one or two of them over the years.

         Hell to Pay. Signet, 1958.
         Murder in Vegas. Signet, 1960.
         Death on Location. Signet, 1962.

   William R. Cox died in 1988, at the age of 87. Here’s a link to his obituary in the New York Times.

CYRIL HARE – The Christmas Murder.

Mercury Mystery 190; digest paperback reprint. No date stated, but circa 1953. Original title: An English Murder. British hardcover edition: Faber & Faber, 1951; US hardcover: Little Brown & Co., 1951. Other paperback reprints: Penguin, UK, 1956, 1960; Perennial, US, 1978; Hogarth Crime, UK, 1986; House of Stratus, UK, 2001.

   This is not a difficult book to find, in other words, if all you want is a copy to read. Even so, the only cover image I’ve been able to come up with is the one I discovered last week in a stack of previously unsorted digest paperbacks beside my desk. It’s a throwback to the Golden Age of Detection, in terms of plot, but the setting and general ambiance – postwar England – has the players at odds with each other for reasons not usually associated with the previously mentioned Golden Age.

   Post-war England was in a stage of upheaval, with the lower classes beginning to feel that the upper classes perhaps need not always be bowed down to, and politicians on either side – and politics in general – were becoming more strident as a consequence. Clashes between various segments of society (the aristocracy vs. the radical socialists, for example) were growing more common, including (it appears) between the old, who remembered pre-war traditions, and the young, who did not. (Not to mention the young who simply wished the old would step aside, having had their day.)

   Neither of Cyril Hare’s most commonly used series characters makes an appearance in this novel. Inspector Mallet was in six of the author’s nine novels. Francis Pettigrew, an elderly and somewhat embittered barrister was in five of them, with an overlap of three in which they both appeared. If this sounds like the beginning of a math problem, I apologize. (I am also not counting two collections of Hare’s short stories.)

   Most of Cyril Hare’s mystery fiction, the author himself a barrister and a judge, deals with courtroom trials and/or the finer points of law, and British law at that. So does this one, so much so that the original title is a perfect fit. That the story takes place at Christmas time is almost entirely incidental. It’s only an excuse to get several members of one family together, along with a few choicely selected friends, at one time, at one place, and snowed in with no recourse to get along with one another – or not.

   There are two detectives of note. First by default, Sergeant Rogers, the bodyguard of Sir Julius Warbeck, M.P.; and secondly — and one wishes that this were not the only detective he ever appeared in — Dr. Wenceslaus Bottwink, a history professor and a refugee from many ism’s in Europe. It is Bottwink who does the true detective work, looking on as an interested observer of both British society at the time and the small microcosm of the same that find themselves isolated in Warbeck Hall, the “oldest inhabited house in Markshire.”

   In terms of “fair play” detection, it might help the reader if he or she were a historian him or herself, but on reflection at book’s end, I think the motive should have been clear, or at the least, clearer than it was to me at the time.

   One disappointment to me, after finding myself elated at the early-on discovery of the kind of story I was in for, was that the book felt too short, without quite enough suspects nor sufficient false trails to be led down. There is an explanation for this. According to mystery historian Tony Medawar, An English Murder was based on “Murder at Warbeck Hall,” a half hour radio play broadcast by the BBC in 1948.

   No matter. I will always gladly accept examples of detective work like this, no matter if short work is made of it or not. The social unrest that provides the setting is a pure 100% bonus.

ACTS OF BETRAYAL. 1997, Conquistador Entertainment. Maria Conchita Alonso, Matt McColm, Muse Watson, David Groh, Susan Lee Hoffman. Director: Jack Ersgard.

   If you were to ask, I’d say that as a rough guess maybe 80% of this 90 minute action film is exactly that: non-stop action. There are more bullets flying in this picture than in many small revolutions, and at the end there are only two people left standing: star corruption witness Eva Ramirez (Maria Conchita Alonso) and stalwart, straight-as-an arrow FBI agent Lance Cooper (Matt McColm), whose thankless job it is to get her before the investigating jury.

   Opposing them is a veritable army of thugs, soldiers of fortune, outlaws, bikers and miscellaneous gunmen, organized and fortified by two individuals (one man with a tall, strikingly beautiful female assistant) in a well-equipped communications van, complete with state-of-the-art computers and backup plans and mercenary forces far beyond anything Al Capone ever dreamed of.

   Did I say that agent Cooper is straight-laced? What I didn’t say is that the lady he is escorting is uninhibited, a non-stop talker, an incessant chatterer, often suggestively and R-rated, and of course, as they most often do, opposites attract. Eventually. I love it. And of course they save each others’ lives more than once.

   For the kind of movie this is, on a scale of one to five, I would give this one a five. The acting is far above average, the dialogue witty, and while realism has no basis in the story line, realism is not exactly what people who watch movies like this are watching for.

   For the kind of movie this also is, there is no scale from one to ten. I do concede that movies like this do not deserve a scale that goes that high.

   I’ve not been able to find this movie on DVD in English — only in Spanish, or as a beat-up former video rental. I guess you’ve have to explain the economics of movie-making to me. I’m sure this never played in theaters, only on cable. Even a cheap five dollar DVD would recoup some of the production costs, wouldn’t it?

   It’s been a while since I’ve printed one of these reviews from TMF, so I’ll repeat the introductory explanation that came with the first one I did, back in last July.

HELEN NIELSEN – After Midnight.

Curtis 07204; paperback reprint, no date stated. Hardcover edition: William Morrow, 1966; hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition], July 1966.

   When I think of defense attorneys and mystery stories, I think of Perry Mason. Sam Drake is a part-time lawyer only, and in the author’s own words, a full-time bon vivant, which is hardly promising. He does don the appropriate suit of shining armor at the proper time, however, to take up the defense of a beautiful client accused of stabbing her husband to death. But then rather than tackling the case as a personal challenge to his own flamboyant sense of justice, he takes the considerably more dangerous step of becoming more and more personally involved with the new widow.

   After an emotion-packed trial in which all the unanswered questions are carefully avoided, some hops and skips in logic combine with what at first seems insurmountable coincidence to lead the solution off in perversely contrary directions. The writing is often noticeably pulpy, to match the hero, I guess.     [C minus]

[UPDATE] 02-07-08. I have only the barest recollection of reading this book. The review you’ve just read is as new to me as it is to you. I can’t locate my copy, nor can I find a cover image online, so for once we’ll have to go without one. (If you happen to have either the paperback or the hardcover, a scan would be welcome.)

   Of Helen Nielsen, born in 1918 and died 2002, Contemporary Authors says:

    “Helen Nielsen writes mystery stories in which she carefully plays fair with the reader, providing enough information for the mystery to be solved. Nielsen mixes her detective puzzles with realistic character studies and often sets her stories in southern California, where she has lived since her childhood. Her California, however, is often the “the chilling rains or the thick, yellow, and dripping fogs of winter,” according to Mary Groff in the St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers.”

   Here are excerpts from reviews of some of her other books, by such critics as

Anthony Boucher: “… in a vein of quietly observant realism, underlined by sustained emotional horror.”

Jon L. Breen: “Nielsen has successfully combined the chase-adventure-espionage tale with a formal, fairly clued detective puzzle, a rarer feat than one might imagine.”

Newgate Callendar: “… a smooth piece of work . . . urbane and agreeable.”

   Two of her novels were considered either hard-boiled or noirish enough for them to have been reprinted by Black Lizard. These are the two covers you’ll see somewhere here above or below.

   After all of this accumulated evidence, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to read After Midnight again, if I could, and see if I have the same opinion as I did back in 1979. I may have been wrong on this one.

   As for Steve Drake, I did not know he was a series character then, but thanks to Al Hubin and Crime Fiction IV, I do now. Here’s a list of all of the cases he handled:

      After Midnight. Morrow, 1966. Setting: California.
      A Killer in the Street. Morrow, 1967. Setting: Tucson, AZ.
      The Darkest Hour. Morrow, 1969. Setting: California.
      The Severed Key. Gollancz, UK, 1973. Setting: California.
      The Brink of Murder. Gollancz, UK, 1976.

   These last two books, which were also the last two she wrote, were never published in the US.

DEFENSELESS. 1991, New Visions Pictures. Barbara Hershey, Sam Shepard, Mary Beth Hurt, K. T. Walsh, Kellie Overbey, Sheree North. Director: Martin Campbell.

   Billed as a thriller, it is every inch that, with lots of dark night suspense and a bloody scene or two. But Defenseless is also a noir film – neo-noir, if you will – with the just the right combination of lighting (which for a color film is quite remarkable) – and a detective movie, too, with just the right amount of legal pyrotechnics.

   Martin Campbell later directed both GoldenEye and Casino Royale, plus both recent Zorro movies (the ones with Catherine Zeta-Jones), which is quite a resume in itself. Working behind the cameras, Campbell knows how to grab viewers quickly (and smoothly) into the story and keep them there.

   But this is Barbara Hershey’s film all the way. As attorney Thelma “T. K.” Knudsen Katwuller, she’s in (at an estimate) 90% of the movie’s footage, and if she weren’t watchable (but she is) there’d be no reason to watch at all. Her most striking feature in this movie is a large mane of unruly and terminally curly jet black hair, but as a character, it’s her disorganized and unlucky-in-love life that makes her sympathetic and vulnerable.

   Brief story summary: She’s having an affair with her client (K. T. Walsh), a rich businessman who’s in trouble because a warehouse he owns has been used to make pornographic films. When she learns that he knows all about it, she goes ballistic. She’s also the one who calls the police when almost immediately after she finds him dead. As it happens, the dead man’s wife (Mary Beth Hurt, so blonde and southern it makes your teeth ache) was her college roommate 20 years earlier, and somewhat unaccountably she wants T. K. to represent her when she’s arrested for the crime.

   As a homicide detective named Beutel, Sam Shepard is the only low-key player in the ensemble, so lanky and laconic you could picture him splitting rails in his spare time. There is a lot more I could tell you, but I’ve already told you more than I usually would, figuring some of the twists already mentioned should remain just that, twists. On the other hand, as I’ve already said, this is the barest bones of a rather complicated plot, and I’m holding back on all of the choicest parts.

   I don’t know if I’ve got you leaning toward watching the movie or not, if by chance a copy happens along your way, but if you do – decide to watch, that is – you’re better off with the video rather the DVD version. There’s no warning on the label, but about 14 minutes are missing. The cuts remove the nude scenes, not surprisingly, but several other scenes are clipped as well, and others are completely eliminated. Also missing are crucial pieces of the plot, nicked to death here and there.

JOHN FARRIS – Sacrifice. Tor; paperback reprint, June 1995. Hardcover edition: Tor, September 1994.

   It has just occurred to me that John Farris has one of the longest careers of any mystery writer still active. His first novel, The Corpse Next Door, was published by Graphic Books, a small but solid line of mostly paperback originals, in 1956. Farris was born in 1936, so if the book wasn’t published until he was 20, the odds are the most of it was written when he was still nineteen.

   He switched to the pen name of Steve Brackeen for his next few books, typical Gold Medal thrillers, except that Gold Medal didn’t do them. One of them, Baby Moll (Crest, 1958), will be reprinted by Hard Case Crime later this year under his own name, a mere 50 years later.

   Farris eventually became the author of the “Harrison High” books, which sold in the millions, and he became an even bigger seller once he started writing horror fiction that was invariably tinged with the supernatural. Books like The Fury (1976) and All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes (1977) are as close to classics in the field as you’re going to get, and yet … even though Farris has averaged close to a book a year since those two books, unlike Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz and mystery-wise, Ed McBain, who came along about the same time he did, it is as if no one’s ever heard of him. Nobody knows his name.

   (As a special note, back when Mystery*File was a print magazine, Bill Crider did a column on John Farris’s early career for me, and you can find it online here. You should go read it.)

   Even though his later books veered convincingly away from standard mystery fare, there’s enough criminous element in them that most of them are included in Crime Fiction IV, Al Hubin’s bibliography of the field. Sacrifice is listed marginally, for example, but in Part 24 of the online Addenda to the Revised CFIV, the dash before the title has been removed.

   Rightfully so. One of the characters is C. G. Butterbaugh, a detective on the trail of the mysterious Greg Walker, who tells the first part of the story, and whose miraculous recovery from a gunshot wound to the head simply amazes the doctors on his case. When Walker and his daughter Sharissa then disappear into the mysterious interior of Guatemala from their sleepy town in Georgia, Butterbaugh needs all of his reading of Sherlock Holmes not to be shaken from the case.

   Nor to be overwhelmed from what he discovers. Take the title of the story, Sacrifice; the fact that Sharissa, although a high school senior, is still a virgin; and the Guatemalan jungle – and what does that add up to you?

   I won’t say, but every reviewer on Amazon will tell you, and as a matter of fact, so does Farris, long before this 379 page novel is halfway over. The question really is, how to we get to the ending from where we are, and who among the sizable cast of characters will survive?

   I doubt that anyone could call this great literature, but once picked up, this is a book not easily put down. There might be something deeper going on, if you were analyze the all of the various relationships, many of them sexual in nature, that develop and entangle each other in this tale – the ending being particularly observant and poignant –

   I’ll take that back. There’s no “might” about it. What this book demonstrates is why Farris has survived as a writer, and those who wrote most of the novels published during the horror boomlet in the 1980s and early 1990s have not. There’s some food for the mind in his fiction, at least this particular example, not just a slug to the gut.