R. AUSTIN FREEMAN – The Jacob Street Mystery.

Hodder & Stoughton, 1942. US title: The Unconscious Witness; Dodd Mead, 1942. US paperback: Avon #122, 1947.

   As Tom Pedley is painting in Gravel Pit Woods, concealed by shrubbery from the casual glance, he observes a woman whose odd behaviour shows she is eavesdropping on a pair of men who have just walked past. One man returns and is furtively followed by the woman, and the intrigued Pedley checks the other end of the path but sees no sign of the second man.

   A week later, the artist, who has no wireless and does not read the papers, learns a murder by forcible administration of poison was committed in the wood during the very time he was painting the sylvan scene, and from a description circulated in print and on the airwaves he is obviously the man being sought for interview by the police.

   Around this time Pedley makes the acquaintance of brassy Mrs Schiller, a modernist artist separated from her husband and now living next door to Pedley. There is also Mr William Vanderpuye, who meets Mrs Schiller when he visits Pedley’s studio to arrange for a portrait sitting. The pair strike up a close friendship and Mr Vanderpuye is the last person seen with her before her disappearance. For while a dead woman is found locked in Mrs Schiller’s room with the key on the inside, she is not its tenant.

   We now leap forward a couple of years. Mrs Schiller is still missing, and Freeman’s most frequently used detective character Dr Thorndyke and his assistant Dr Jervis become involved in the case due to a large bequest which would be hers if she was still alive. A presumption of death has been requested but the solicitor feels uneasy under the odd circumstances. Is she still living, and if she is, why has she not been found despite sterling efforts by the authorities and a vast amount of publicity in the press? Who was the woman found dead in her room and what is the connection between them?

   My verdict: Readers will learn yet another way to open a door locked from the inside. The method in this case needs a particular type of key, common at the time, so fair enough, and its use helps point up the fact that, despite appearances, the dead woman found in Mrs Schiller’s room was not a suicide.

   There are sufficient and fair clues, and the investigations are described in lively fashion. It turns out to be a more complicated case than it seems at first glance. I guessed part of the solution but not the whole. All in all I found this, the final mystery novel Freeman wrote before his death in 1943, one of the better Thorndyke outings.

   Etext: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500481.txt

[UPDATE]   Later the same evening, excerpted from an email from Mary, after she’d seen her review online:

  Dear Steve

   It looks very good. The cover is certainly eye-catching!

   I suspect the illustrator’s artistic license had been recently renewed and was operating at its highest level! A pistol shot is mentioned at one point but there is no gunplay of the kind depicted on this cover.

   The woman looks as if she has fainted but it may be a clever bit of word play since we can take it she is intended to represent the dead woman. This is because the latter could be said to have acted as an unconscious (in the sense of unknowing) posthumous witness to her own murder due to certain evidence her remains provide.

   On the other hand, the publisher may have simply got the cover details mixed up…

MURDER AT GLEN ATHOL. Invincible/Chesterfield, 1936. John Miljan, Irene Ware, Iris Adrian, Noel Madison, James Burtis. Based on the Doubleday Crime Club novel by Norman Lippincott. Director: Frank R. Stayer.

   The date of the movie as given on the DVD case is 1932, but that’s in error. The book of the same title that the film is based on is 1935, a one-shot detective novel by Norman Lippincott, about whom very little is known. The book itself is scarce, with no copies being offered for sale by anyone on the Internet at the present time.

   I happen to have a copy myself, but of course it’s inaccessible, along with most of my collection of Crime Club mysteries, shelved away in the far end of the basement, which I do intend to get to one day. Really soon now. So any impression of the mystery that Mr. Lippincott wrote is going to have to come from this filmed version instead, and I must say that I was impressed.

   Within the 64 minutes that it takes to watch this tightly directed detective movie are all of the standard ingredients of the Golden Age mystery yarns of the time: A detective, Bill Holt, on holiday, played rather stiffly by John Miljan; his trusted and slightly comic assistant, Jeff (James Burtis) who looks like an ex-prizefighter; a brash and sexy vamp who lives next door, Muriel Randel (Iris Adrian), who’s not afraid of a little blackmail on the side, even if one of her victims is local gangster Gus Colletti (Noel Madison). See below.

   Visiting next door, where Holt is invited to a dinner party one evening is Jane Maxwell (Irene Ware), who in this movie is merely wholesomely pretty, not beautiful. Holt’s eye lights up as soon as he sees her; Muriel’s overt charms mean nothing in comparison. Jane Maxwell has her own secrets, but no one this wholesomely pretty could be guilty.

   And Muriel is one of three people who are murdered later that same evening. I haven’t mentioned the other two, but suffice it to say that one of them is assumed to have killed both Muriel and the other victim, which suits the local police just fine. They’re wrong, of course, and the job Bill Holt takes upon himself is to prove it, and it isn’t easy, what with all of the red herrings, lies and false trails he’s forced to dodge and make his way down before doubling back.

   Movies like this are often played for laughs as well as for the detective aspects, but thankfully such small hilarities are kept to a minimum. It’s only a guess, but I’d have to say that the movie stuck fairly well to the novel it was based on. Whether that’s so or not, and low budget or not, this is detective movie that’s both worthy of the name and the just over sixty minutes that’s needed to take it all in.

PostScript: Here are the two leading ladies of this film, neither of whom are dressed as they are in this movie, but as if this blog weren’t classy enough, they do add a little something to the overall ambience, don’t they?

Iris Adrian

Irene Ware

LEANN SWEENEY – Shoot from the Lip

Signet, paperback original, January 2007.

   There are a few private detectives in the world of crime fiction that Kevin Burton Smith doesn’t (yet) know about, he of the Thrilling Detective website, which attempts to list ALL of them, and in all honesty, he pretty well succeeds. Case in point, though: He’s missing Houston-based Abby Rose, who’s in this book, her fourth case overall, the previous three being:

   Pick Your Poison. Signet, pbo, May 2004. Abby inherits her late father’s home and computer business along with her twin sister, Kate. When she investigates the murder of their gardener, she learns some truths about their true birth parents.

   A Wedding to Die For. Signet, pbo, January 2005. Independently wealthy, Abby has started her own business as a private investigator finding birth parents for adoptees. Her client is a bride-to-be who hires Abby to find her biological mother so she can be at her wedding, but a murder occurs at the reception instead.

   Dead Giveaway. Signet, pbo, November 2005. After Abby is hired by a 19 year old basketball star looking for his birth family, the woman who found him on her doorstep as an infant is murdered.

    In spite of all of the murders and the fact that Abby is a fully licensed PI, these are all “cozy” type mysteries, and so is the book in hand, Shoot from the Lip. Yellow Rose Investigations is the name on her business card. Her twin sister Kate, a psychiatrist, does the psychological assessments on any prospective clients, and with money in the bank, she can easily afford to turn down clients whose cases she doesn’t wish to take.

   Her client this time around is young Emmy Lopez, who’s been responsible for her three younger siblings ever since their mother died. An upcoming appearance on a TV reality show brings out the possibility that there was a fourth child Emmy never knew about and who may have been put up for adoption, either legally or (more likely) illegally.

   The story’s told in raw-boned but light-hearted Texas style, with lots of details of the two sisters’ various romances with their steady (and not so steady) boy friends, along with Abby’s continual references to her daddy, now gone but far from forgotten.

    Murders do occur in this book, which I have just realized that I have forgotten to mention, but unfortunately the detection involved is slim to none. Not only are Abby and her circle of family and friends relatively slow on the uptake when dangerous things begin to happen, but the killer makes the fatal flaw of simply hanging around too long. He or she is caught only by doing one evil deed after another, until eventually going too far, when at last the truth is revealed.

   Don’t get me completely wrong. For fans of low-keyed murder investigations, enhanced and enlivened by a crew of friendly folk who seem to come back book after book, they could do far worse than stay with Abby Rose, wherever her adventures may take her.

JOHN GALLIGAN – The Nail Knot

Worldwide; paperback reprint, October 2006. Trade paperback: Bleak House, May 2005.

   A “nail knot” is one of those clever devices that are used most often by fly fishermen, and as such it is something I knew nothing about before reading this book. (The last time I went fishing was with my grandfather when I was ten or so, when all we did was to drop our lines into water off a long pier jutting out into Lake Michigan. No casting abilities of any kind required. Nor did we catch anything, but why do I still remember the day, now well over fifty years ago?)

   The primary protagonist of The Nail Knot, a laid back sort of fellow who calls himself the Dog, is a fly fisherman, however, and I’ll get back to him in a minute.

   In the meantime, here is a short list of other mystery novels or series which I’ve just come up with in which fly fishing is a substantial component, in no particular order.

   There are probably others that I am not thinking of now. Please add others, if you can. This is the first of at least three books in John Galligan’s “Dog” series, but some research shows that he wais the author of one earlier mystery novel, Red Sky, Red Dragonfly, also published by Bleak House (in 2001), in which a hockey player from Wisconsin travels to Japan to teach English for a year and ends up being implicated in his predecessor’s disappearance.

   Subsequent and/or reportedly forthcoming follow-ups in John Galligan’s fly fishing series are:

   This is a long-range projection, and I suspect that some of these titles may turn out to be totally hypothetical. But assuming that you’re still with me, let’s take a look at the book in hand. As mentioned above, “the Dog” is how the leading character refers to himself — he tells the story, and on a strictly personal basis, it’s quite a story that has to tell.

   The Dog’s real name is Ned Oglivie, and he is what you might call a dropout from the human race, wandering across the country and checking out fishing spots as he goes. A nomadic fly fisherman without parallel, you might say. Until he reaches Black Earth, Wisconsin, that is, where it is that he finds a body along the edge of the creek that leading into (or out of) local Lake Bud. (You can see that even though it may be an important plot point, it didn’t make much of an impression on me.)

    He also finds The Woman, but not until she removes from the crime scene all of the evidence that (Dog later learns) points to her semi-senile father. But let the Dog describe the lady, from page 13:

   You can tell at once that the Dog is hooked. Her name is Melvina Racheletta O’Malley, or Junior for short, and the Dog discovers to his dismay that he cannot walk away when she asks him to help her in what she insists is a frame-up of her father, Mel.

    The dead man has only lately been a local, which first of all is not a good thing in rural Wisconsin, and secondly he had been an activist in trying to revive and save the fish in Lake Bud, which is also definitely not a good thing — activism, that is.

   The solution to the mystery depends greatly on who was able to tie a nail knot, and at what time. It wouldn’t have been a terribly difficult case to solve, if one had a protagonist who was a little more, shall we say, pro-active on the case — you soon get the feeling that if the Dog were any more low key than he is, he wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning — but then again meeting all of the local folk, some more local and inbred than others, and some not, would have been not nearly so much fun as this.

UPDATE. Quite coincidentally there has been a discussion of fly-fishing mysteries on DorothyL this past week (early November), in relation to a slightly different topic of “male cozies.” Here are a couple more mystery series that have been pointed out as belonging to the category, still small but obviously growing:

DESPERATE. RKO Radio Pictures, 1947. Steve Brodie, Audrey Long, Raymond Burr, Douglas Fowley, Jason Robards (Sr.). Directed by Anthony Mann.

   An early film noir, back before directors knew that that’s what they were filming, back when a low budget on a crime film was the impetus for creative lighting and innovative camera techniques, and not because they realized that they were creating a movie genre.

   I reviewed Anthony Mann’s The Great Flamarion (Republic, 1945) earlier this year, a movie considered by some to be in the noir genre, so Desperate is far from being the first that he directed in the category, but to me, both seem flawed. Neither seems to me to epitomize in their entireties what a noir film truly is (or was).

   But there are some moments in Desperate that, once seen, will always be remembered. When trucker Steve Randall (Steve Brodie) is being thoroughly beaten off camera in the hideout of gangster Walt Radak (Raymond Burr), someone bumps the overhead light fixture with a single light bulb in it, starting it to swing back and forth in the otherwise darkened room. The alternating light and shadowy darkness combines with the sounds of punches and groans off to the side in an epiphany of mind-cringing delight.

   Toward the end of the movie, as Radak has caught up with Randall again, as Radak’s brother is about to die in the electric chair, for which Radak blames Randall, the two men sit opposite each other across the kitchen table in a cheap apartment flat, Radak with a gun in his hand, Randall about to die at exactly the same moment as Radak’s brother — their eyes, their sweat — it is as if that moment will stay fixed in time forever, but it does not, as the clock ticks slowly onward.

   One could wish, then, and fervently so, that the overall story would hold together more cohesively than it does. Why Randall’s wish to escape Radak is clear. He’s an innocent joe caught up in a foiled warehouse robbery, but when Radak threatens his wife of four months (Audrey Long), he becomes irrational with his thoughts of saving her — but his actions, setting them both off on the run without telling the police, just don’t make sense. Randall doesn’t ever appear quite irrational enough, nor is he supposed to be. His wife Anne simply does as she’s told — questioning but always obeying — and yet she wouldn’t if he were.

   This was Raymond Burr’s second or third credited appearance, and as a moody almost insane criminal thug, which is what he often played in B-movies like these in the 1940s, his eyes seem to glower whenever he’s filled with anger or hatred. In this movie this is 95% of the time.

   One other problem this movie faces, however, is that Mr. and Mrs. Randall, no matter how dire their situation, when they’re together, it’s never quite dire enough. There is no question that they will survive, and in a noir film, that’s always a fatal flaw. But so that I can’t be accused of giving away an ending: I just lied, and they don’t.

   Here’s one connection with crime fiction in printed form that I didn’t know before now. Audrey Long’s film career, which began in 1942, ended in 1952 when she married Leslie Charteris, creator of the Saint. Their marriage lasted until 1993, when he died.

JOHN DELLBRIDGE – The Lady in the Wood

Hurst & Blackett Ltd., hardcover; no date stated [1950]. No US publication.

   As readers of this blog will know full well, it has recently been discovered that “John Dellbridge” was the pen name of Frederick Joseph De Verteuil (1887-1963). A native of Trinidad, he became a barrister and practiced law in India and England before becoming a novelist.

    I’ll forego the usual bibliography, as the previous entry already includes one, as well as a small amount of other information that has been learned about the author. There are six mysteries to his credit in all, however, the last three having as their lead character one Rupert Hambledon, about whom more in a minute. The Lady in the Wood is the last of the three, which were published in a short span between 1947 and 1950. Dellbridge’s earlier crime-writing career spanned a much earlier 1927 to 1929.

    The story is told in quasi-documentary style, in the beginning as if in the form of local Inspector Kemsing’s report to some superior officer, starting with Chapter One, page 7:

   The dead woman had been a heroine in World War II, having parachuted into France and done great deeds undercover with the Resistance. Some Vichy French and some members of the Gestapo are immediately suspected. On the other hand, this is England, and the world is in the process of becoming civilized again. Lady Barnet had come down from London to be one of the guests at nearby Schlatts Hall, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Bonteve.

   So a manor house mystery is what this is, no more and no less, replete with constant and subsequent misbehavior and strange actions on the part of the many participants, many clues, another death – that of a maid who perhaps knew too much and who turned to blackmail as a result? – and endless timetabling, more than I can remember in any mystery I’ve read in many years.

   Sir Rupert Hambledon is called in early on by one of the suspects. That he has a title means that he travels in the same circles as the class of people who live in or are guests at manor homes. He is not from Scotland Yard, however, but a very expensive inquiry agent. (One hesitates in referring to him as a mere private detective.) Being the “best known detective in England” and “the smartest” (page 111), in no time at all he is in charge of the case, Inspector Kemsing more than willing to defer to him.

   One of Sir Rupert’s other traits is that “he commits irregularities that no official policeman would dare to try” and “these irregularities get results.” (Also page 111.) By the way, the inspector does not narrate the entire book. He alternates telling the story of the investigation with Mr. Perceval Hadlow-Down, a solicitor of one of the guests, who often plays Watson to Sir Rupert. Says Hadlow-Down early in his own narrative, when it is his turn;

Sir Rupert may outdo either of those two gentlemen by stating on page 70:

   Of course there is not a shred of legal evidence at this point, and if the murderer were to be charged, the inspector would be “laughed out of court.”

   Does Sir Rupert indeed know? In the end, after the killer is indeed caught and charged, there are indications that he did, but to my mind, the strongest point in his final summary of the case was based on an flimsy (and even erroneous) insight into human nature. He was exaggerating, were you to ask me. It was a good guess, perhaps more, but that it took the remaining two-thirds of the book to name the killer for keeps strongly suggests that a good guess is all that it was.

   The purpose of the alternating narration – not too common in detective novels? – serves the author in this case well. That is to say, it keeps the reader off-balance, preventing her or him of being aware of what each narrator knew and when while the story was being told by the other.

   In short, however, if you are the kind of mystery reader who likes lots of clues, time tables, and exhaustive interrogations of the parties involved, you will find a lot to like, if not love, in this book. If not, then most definitely not.

MISTER SCARFACE, a.k.a. I Padroni della città. (Italy / West Germany). USA: PRO International Pictures, 1977; dubbed. Jack Palance, Harry Baer, Al Cliver, Edmund Purdom, Vittorio Caprioli. Director: Fernando Di Lio.

   Sometimes you get exactly what you pay for. In my case I paid 99c plus shipping for both halves of a Jack Palance double feature on DVD, of which this is one. Half, that is. If you call it a dollar for this one, it’s worth about half of that, plus 85 minutes of viewing time.

   Which I wouldn’t have spent it weren’t worth viewing, but I’m certainly glad I didn’t spend three bucks. The transfer to DVD was terrible. Color bursts and scenes shot in darkness coming out muddy and shadowy where shadows are not supposed to be can really spoil your mood for a movie. (The other half, The Four Deuces (1975, with Carol Lynley), may make the deal come out a steal, and as always, I will let you know.)

   The movie was filmed in the slums of Rome, or so I’m told, as I didn’t recognize anything anywhere at any time, but truthfully I’ve seen worse slums. The Italian ambiance must make all the difference in the world. “Scarface” Manzari (Jack Palance) is the head of one gang of crooks and thieves, and young, overly brash Tony (Harry Baer) is a bag man for another. Determined to rise in his own gang of crooks and thieves, headed by Luigi Cherico (transplanted British actor Edmund Purdom), Tony takes Scarface for ten million lira, of which he hands only three million back to Luigi.

   Does Scarface take this lying down? No, of course not, you know what I mean? Jack Palance glowers a lot and handles his long cigarette holder with consummate ease, but he looks far, far away from what a few IMDB viewers variously call a powerful and exciting Italian gangster film, with an “imposing” performance by Palance. None of the above is precisely true, but beyond that, we are only arguing matters of taste.

   Comic relief is provided by Vittorio Caprioli, as an aging gangster who, after being dumped by Tony’s gang, casts his lot with the brash young lad. Both of their performances are worth watching. The long shootout at the end would have been boring and utterly without redemption without the former’s humorous ineptitude, for example.

   Even so, the long shootout at the end manages to come awfully close to that inscrutable, indefinable boundary between good and just plain awful. Or depending on your mood at the time, perhaps the line is crossed not only once, but several times, in this last burst of highly choreographed diorama (or low drama) of cars, motorcycles, guns, guns and more guns.

JOHN WESSEL – This Far, No Further

Island/Dell; paperback reprint, November 1997. Hardcover, first edition: Simon & Schuster, October 1996.

    Here’s an even better example of what I was rambling on about just before this when I was reviewing Dreamboat, the Jack Flippo PI novel by Doug J. Swanson, although I don’t think this first book by John Wessel, also a private eye novel, caught anyone’s eye for an Edgar nomination.

   Wessel’s detective is named Harding, an unlicensed PI working in the Chicago area. Both he and the author seem to have had a three-novel run, and that was all that it appears there will ever be:

         This Far, No Further. Simon & Schuster, 1996; Island/Dell, 1997
         Pretty Ballerina. Simon & Schuster, June 1998. No US paperback edition.
         Kiss It Goodbye. Simon & Schuster, January 2001. No US paperback edition.

   The fact that only the first one came out in paperback certainly says something, but of course it is never easy to interpret these things correctly. One obvious explanation is that for the last ten years (or more?) private eye novels no longer rule the roost as they did, once upon a time. Either Wessel’s writing never caught on, starting with his very first book, or perhaps even more likely, Island/Dell didn’t give him (or the books) the chance they needed.

   And there are not too many series with continuing characters which beat the odds and succeed in hardcover only. Without the paperback reprint coming out a year later, just about the time the next one in hardcover shows up, a series almost always seems to lose steam, then is forced to pack up and leave, never to be seen again.

   Should the Harding books have succeeded? Were they wrongly done in? I have mixed feelings about this. There is a lot to like in This Far, No Further, and there is a lot, well, let’s say that I had problems with, and maybe other readers did too.

   First to like: Harding tells his own story, first person (uh-oh) present tense. Present tense? I can live with that, even though it fought me a little. The telling is spirited and enthusiastic, even though Harding has been badly wronged in his life, so far, and the less-travelled (grittier) paths and neighborhoods in Chicago are described with the panache and style of a long-time inhabitant.

   Second to like: Harding’s lady friend Allison, a commercial photographer and (evidently) one-time girl friend who assists him on this case. The banter between them is relaxed, pointed, trenchant and (all at the same time) far more cutting than Spenser ever has had with Susan, as enjoyable as the Robert B. Parker books are and always have been. Nor has much of the past between Alison and Harding been made clear by the end of the book. Allison, who is also very good at the martial arts, seems as well to have close lady friends of her own.

   Not to like very much: The utter sleaziness of the dead girl’s death in a rundown motel outside of Chicago, the victim of what appears to have been a sex tryst that went way too far. Harding was following the male in the party, a noted plastic surgeon whose wife hired the lawyer who hired Harding. Much is made later of videotapes and other paraphernalia.

    Not to like even more: The plot itself eventually becomes verbal sludge and next to impossible to follow. You may take this as an overstatement born out of frustration, and you would be right, but nonetheless, it is true. Harding’s own past – the reason behind the loss of his license – eventually becomes entangled with the doc and his problems, and Harding’s attraction to his wife (and his client, twice removed), and I confess that by that time, I was only skimming the pages.

   As fast as I could. Was I about to about to quit? No.

   Absolutely not. Did I go online and buy the next two books in the series? Yes.

   Can there be more to be said than that? Probably, but I hope I don’t need to.

DOUG J. SWANSON – Dreamboat. Jack Flippo #2. HarperCollins, hardcover, February 1995. Harper, paperback, January 1996.

   The mystery shelves of used bookstores are filled with any number of series of detective fiction that appeared out of nowhere, flamed brightly for a short while, then just as suddenly disappeared. If there were still used bookstores, that is. They are, alas, an endangered species, are they not?

   I’m not going to digress off in that direction, though. Not this time. I’m going to stay focused and on track, even if I have to force myself. Private eye novels, which this one is, or cozies, which this one isn’t, it makes no difference. If they don’t catch on, in spite of critical acclaim, they gone, they’re history, and how many of the Jack Flippo PI novels can you name? Do you know what major city he worked out of? Had you heard of Jack Flippo before you began reading this review?

   One of the reasons I began this review the way that I did is that on the front cover Doug J. Swanson is described as an “Edgar Award Nominee.” Given all of the questions I just asked you, this is a fact I did not know myself — but it’s why my mind went poetic on me, re the fire “that flamed briefly brightly” and all, and I hope you’ll forgive me.

    Here’s the list of all of Swanson’s mystery fiction. The detective in each of them is Jack Flippo.

       Big Town. Harpercollins, hc, February 1994.
         Harper, pb, February 1995
      Dreamboat. Harpercollins, hc, February 1995
         Harper, pb, January 1996.
      96 Tears. Harpercollins, November 1996.
         No paperback edition.
      Umbrella Man. Putnam, hc, July 1999.
         Berkley, pb, May 2000.
      House of Corrections. Putnam, hc, August 2000.
         Berkley, pb, May 2001.

   That’s it. That’s all there were. Viewing it from the outside, and given the three year gap around then, it looks very much as though Flippo’s career was all but over after the first three. The Edgar nomination came in 1995 for Big Town in the category of Best First Novel of the Year. (It did not win. The award went to The Caveman’s Valentine by George Dawes Green, as I am sure you will recall.)

   Swanson himself was a long-time reporter for the Dallas Morning News, or so I’ve discovered, and at the age of only 53, there’s a good chance he still is. Luckily he’s had a day job to fall back upon. But what this also means is that he knows the Dallas area, and the people that live there, all kinds of them: the small-town hicks, the semi-slimy big-city entrepreneurs, the ladies of the evening, high and low, good folk and bad. He also has a sense of humor about his approach to mystery fiction (and probably life as well) that tickles my funny bone, and who knows, maybe yours as well.

   Jack Flippo used to be an Assistant D.A. in Dallas. At the beginning of this book, he’s a non-practicing lawyer, a newly licensed investigator, and he’s in jail for simple assault. The victim: his ex-wife’s boyfriend. (This turns out to be important.)

   The case he’s asked to work on, by the insurance exec who bails him out, is to look into the death by drowning of a gent with a half-million dollar policy on him Off he goes, therefore, to a small town called Baggett, somewhere in East Texas, where he meets a small town justice of the peace and an even smaller (five foot six) hick sheriff by the name of Loyce Slapp. You can bet that Flippo doesn’t get anywhere, and fast, even if he suspects foul play, and you would win.

   He also meets a girl named Sally, good-looking, of course, and who works for the dead man’s partner in an exotic-type night club in Dallas. This is important, too, since a friend of hers named Bobby has gone missing, and she’s starting to get worried. Apparently he is (or was) in on whatever business went on in Baggett, and is in hiding (or worse). Thieves do fall out, and in Texas everything does grow taller, including tales like this one.

   While Jack is quick with the quip and talks with a basket full of confidence, I have to say (reluctantly) that it would be nice if he had a small modicum of competence to go with the confidence. Things do not always go smoothly for Mr. Flippo, in other words. Spenser he is not, not to mention that he does not have a Hawk for a back-up. Nor even back-up plans for every contingency, for that matter either. On the other hand, not all of his various problems and ill-times mini-disasters are entirely his fault, exactly.

   So a somewhat warped sense of humor (like mine) is what you need as a reader, and if that is what you have, you will have a rattling good time. On the other hand, and you may be certain that there is one, the story also goes off into some dark and dangerous directions now and then as well. It isn’t all funny-named characters who are in over their head in matters criminous. Some of the bad guys are rather competent, as a matter of fact. The ending — if I may now at this juncture skip over some of the story lines which you are better off reading yourself anyway — is better than average, even in comparison with PI novels which take themselves a lot more seriously.

    I would imagine that the five Jack Flippo novels are all there are going to be. If you were ever to spot one in a used bookshop shelf someday, may I suggest that you don’t pass it by. If the description of this one hasn’t sent you running in the other direction already, which of course I realize that it very well may, do yourself a favor and give it a new home. You’ll thank me, I?m sure, and maybe as early as the very same evening.
   

SUED FOR LIBEL. RKO Radio Pictures, 1939. Kent Taylor, Linda Hayes, Lilian Bond, Morgan Conway, Richard Lane. Based on a story by Wolfe Kaufman. Director: Leslie Goodwins.

   I don’t know about you, but while watching the cast credits go by at the beginning of this movie, Kent Taylor was the only one I recognized right away. Morgan Conway I knew played Dick Tracy in a couple of films later on, but the others, including the two ladies, were only names to me, and more about them later.

   But whenever the star appeal is as low as this, as it was to me, I start thinking “low budget.” And on occasion, starting with low expectations is not all that bad, as this rather generic detective film met or surpassed those low expectations, and then some. Not by a mile, I grant you, but at least by a hair. It’s built around a radio program put on by a newspaper to dramatize the day’s events live. Being an Old Time Radio fan myself, that was a plus right there.

   Thanks to a practical joke one reporter (Linda Hayes) plays on another (Richard Lane), the program directed by a third (Kent Taylor) gets the jury’s verdict in a murder case backwards, “guilty” instead of “innocent.”

   Hence the title of the movie. To win the resulting lawsuit, it is up to the threesome above to solve the murder themselves, and with degrees of trepidation and humor, they do. Morgan Conway is the accused murderer, and Lilian Bond is the wife of the murdered man who’s also a close friend of the defendant. Maybe you could write your own scenario from this.

Lilian Bond

   Wolfe Kaufman, who did write the story, which holds water only as long as you don’t watch too closely, has one title listed in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV: an Inner Sanctum Mystery entitled I Hate Blondes, published by Simon & Schuster in 1946. Kent Taylor, an actor in the Clark Gable vein, but nowhere near as successful, later played Boston Blackie on TV, and Clark Gable didn’t.

   Lilian Bond plays her role in the courtroom strictly on the straight and narrow, but later on when the hairpins start flying, she becomes quite a looker, even though her career never went anywhere. I think it should have. That’s her photo up above, but (truth in advertising) she never looked like that in this film, no matter what I just said.

   As for Linda Hayes, the snappy gal reporter lady, her career lasted only for 17 movies, all filmed between 1939 and 1942. She may be more famous as the mother of Cathy Lee Crosby, who later briefly played the super-powered crimefighter Wonder Woman on television. Perhaps you can see the resemblance.