A. G. E. CROMWELL – Death in the Copse. Rodney Wayne #2. Wright & Brown, UK, hardcover, 1940.

   This is the second of just two private detective novels written by the almost entirely unknown A. G. E. Cromwell, the first adventure of Rodney Wayne being Murder in Flat 14 (Wright & Brown, 1939). The two books can be found on the Internet at varying prices, but as for the author himself, I have found only a single reference to him, that being an announcement for one of his books in a contemporaneous Australian newspaper. (If you can find more, please by all means, let me know.)

   Wayne eventually has a client in Death in the Copse, but at the beginning, he’s only on his way to a weekend stay at a good friend’s countryside mansion, a short train ride from London. The friend is Archie Crofts, a good-natured, self-made but very wealthy businessman. Besides the staff, there is a small groups of other friends also staying for the weekend, so when Archie is found shot to death at night in a small area of a forest, the number of suspects is also very limited. (The killer is seen running back to the house after the fatal shot is heard, so there is no talk of a passing tramp being responsible.)

   Wayne finds himself somewhat at odds with the local police inspector, at least at first, but when Wayne decides he won’t get anywhere by going head to head with him, he persuades himself to join forces with him. There is a lot of discussion of alibis between the two of them, including the strange behavior of one possible witness who has to have an alibi for another twisted out of him instead of his being up front and forward about it. We have probably read enough mysteries ourselves to know what that means, don’t we?

   Cromwell himself clearly had read enough works of detective himself to be able to produce a quite decent and very readable one on his own. Until the last chapter, that is, which is, to put it bluntly, a disappointment. Once you put the book down and you start asking yourself, in terms of the figuring out what really did happen, why does the final explanation almost completely contradict what we told was observed earlier?

   An interesting artifact of its day, but not one, I’d say, worth searching out for. (I’d send you mine, but unfortunately it has a page missing from the end of a chapter somewhere in the middle. By no means is it an essential one, but it *is* missing.)

LEO BRUCE – Death in Albert Park. Carolus Deene #13.   W. H. Allen, UK, hardcover, 1964. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1979. Academy Chicago Publishers, US, paperback, 2005.

   This thirteenth case of  Senior History Master Carolus Deene of the Queen’s School, Newminster, was originally published in 1964 by W. H. Allen & Co. of London, and there have been at least ten subsequent titles featuring the forty-year-old teacher. The present title, however, would appear to be only the sixth to be published in the United States to date. Since it is the first of the “Death” titles, however, perhaps Scribners intends to continue the series., which would be a real treat.

   Deene bakes an interest in London affairs when three middle-aged women from the depressing suburb surrounding Albert Park in the remote southeastern part of the city are fatally knifed between the shoulder blades. The teacher’s interest in crime as history prompts him to investigate the backgrounds of the victims to see if, indeed, they were just random targets of a crazed psychotic popularly called the Stabber.

   There is some hilarious satirizing of the excesses in the contemporary theater along the way; and we meet some of the not-too-likeable regulars in the persons of Deene’s housekeeper and cook, Mrs. Stick, a stickler for appearances, and young, precocious student Robert Priggley who even annoys Deene but who sometimes serves as bis own personal “irregular.”

   Deene’s interference is not in the least appreciated by Detective Superintendent Dyke who does everything to thwart his interviews. Also adverse to his investigative hobby is his school headmaster, the cowering Mr. Garringer.

   This particular novel employs a plot device reminiscent of a famous 1936 Christie, though handled quite differently. Mr. Bruce is a deft hand in creating suspense, and he carefully plays fair with the reader in his deployment of clues.     The first Carolus Deene novel was At Death’s Door (1955) , and Leo Bruce is also the creator of series Character Sergeant Beef.

JEROME WEIDMAN – I’ll Never Go There Any More. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1941. Reprinted in paperback several times, including Avon T-153, 1956, shown below:

   Two Summers and a lifetime ago, I picked up a novel at a Used Book Store just to be polite; I wasn’t really looking for it, but it seemed interesting and the shopkeeper looked bored, so I figured to brighten her day for two dollars and fifty cents.

   The book was I’ll Never Go There Any More,  by Jerome Weidman, and it’s a young-man-in-New-York novel, a colorful, sprawling thing about Arthur Thacker coming to the big city, meeting lots of colorful, sprawling people, and learning about Life in all its sprawling color.

   And it ain’t bad, either. The characters are well-drawn, the story moves apace, and the ending seems fateful and natural, profound and shocking, all at once, just the right coda for a young-man-in-New York novel. It looks to have been published just before America entered World War II, which is probably why it isn’t better remembered today – after December 7, readers had a lot more on their minds than the adventures of a young man in New York.

   But as I was reading this thing, getting the background on the various characters popping in and out, I came upon six or eight pages that seemed kind of familiar: something about an Italian banker and his sons, and how they all turned out. Damn, it just kept reminding me of something.

   So I did some research and found that this was the basis of Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1949 movie House of Strangers. Not the book: just these six or eight pages. That’s right, Twentieth Century Fox bought I’ll Never Go There Any More, tossed out three hundred and thirty pages of it, and filmed what was left. House of Strangers is an okay noir drama, but I always felt it lacked a proper pay-off at the end, and it’s certainly very far removed from Weidman’s novel.

   But that’s not the end of our story. No, friends. Because in 1954 the studio did what studios always did in those days: they took the script of House of Strangers, added some guns and horses and re-made it as Broken Lance. And that’s how Jerome Weidman’s young-man-in-New-York novel ended up as a Western.

BROKEN LANCE. 20th Century Fox, 1954. Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Jean Peters, Richard Widmark, Katy Jurado, Eduard Franz, Hugh O’Brian, E. G. Marshall, Earl Holliman, Carl Benton Reid. Screenplay by Richard Murphy based on the screenplay for House of Strangers by Philip Yordan. Director: Edward Dmytryk.

   By 1954 when this drama of a family in conflict and brothers at each others throats was made, the Western was the dominant form of entertainment in theaters around the country, and the simple morality plays of an earlier era had been replaced with far more complex and adult themes. Novels, histories, and original screenplays were being churned out in great number and it was perhaps natural that Hollywood would turn to its own products for the basis of new material for the seemingly endless demand for new Westerns.

   It had already begun in the Post War-era. Raoul Walsh remade his own High Sierra as Colorado Territory, John Ford’s Four Men and a Prayer was remade as Fury at Furnace Creek, Kiss of Death as The Fiend Who Walked the West, Objective Burma as Distant Drums, and soon Asphalt Jungle as Badlanders, The Lost Patrol as The Last of the Comanches, even Gunga Din as Sergeants 3.

   Broken Lance was a remake of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1949 film noir House of Strangers. In that one Edward G. Robinson was the patriarch of an Italian banking family whose favorite son, Richard Conte who loves society woman Susan Hayward, goes to jail to save the old man when he gets in trouble with his high-handed ways only to find his brothers led by Luther Adler out to destroy him and cheat him out of his part of the family fortune when he finishes his prison term.

   Here Spencer Tracy is Matt Devereaux, cattle rancher and pioneer who has died while his youngest son Joseph (Robert Wagner) was in prison. Joe’s half brothers Ben, Mike, and Denny (Richard Widmark, Hugh O’Brian, and Earl Holliman Jr.) try to buy him out and send him packing when Joe is released, but Joe still has business and memories to deal with.

   The movie opens with a lobo wolf running wild across the landscape. We will later see Matt refuse to let son Denny shoot the same wolf, and at one point Matt’s Native American foreman (Eudard Franz) tells Joseph that Matt’s spirit runs with the wolves. We see and hear the wolf a final time as the music rises and The End appears hammering home the theme.

   The story is told in flashback, and to Mankiewicz’s plot, Dmytryk and screenwriter Richard Murphy add a sub plot about racism and intolerance since Wagner’s Mother (Katy Jurado, who was only six years older than Wagner) is Native American, a source of many not so subtle snubs from Matt’s business partners..

   When Old Matt takes on a copper mine poisoning his source of water and destroys the place he finds his friend the territorial governor (E. G. Marshall — and yes the film several times refers to Arizona as a state well before that happened) is unwilling to help him unless he stops Joe from romancing his daughter Barbara (Jean Peters).

   The legal proceedings go badly and Joe volunteers to go to prison to save his father striking a deal to only serve a short sentence if Matt will sell the land to the copper interests, but when the time comes older brother Ben refuses to sign, Joe is sent to prison for three years, and Matt has a stroke confronted by Ben and his brothers refusal to help Joe.

   While Joe is in prison the brothers undo everything Old Matt built and eventually cause his death in a well done scene reminiscent of the end of El Cid. But Joe wants no part of fratricide having said his goodbyes to his dead father and is ready to leave when Ben decides he would never sleep well as long as Joe was alive and decides to kill him.

   Beautifully shot by cinematographer Joe MacDonald, with a strong score by Leigh Harline, and imaginatively staged by director Edward Dmytryk, Broken Lance is a satisfying adult Western with the shoot ’em up action nicely balanced by family drama, a trial, and Tracy in larger than life scene stealing mode (there are two life sized portraits of Tracy featured in the film I would kill to own).

   An avid polo player when he was younger Tracy sits a horse well and looks natural in the saddle. At this point he was still active enough to look believable in action scenes.

   Widmark is good (when isn’t he?) as Ben the resentful older brother who hates his father enough to destroy every thing and everyone around him including his half brother. O’Brian and Holliman fill out the roles of the two wastrel middle brother well enough though neither has much to do.

   Of course Katy Jurado is fine in anything she plays and in this period has one fine role after another. Eduard Franz plays Old Matt’s Native foreman and surrogate father to Wagner’s character with his usual quiet efficiency (he plays a similar role as a tracker in The Burning Hills). Peters, Marshall, Reid are all solid in their various supporting bits as well.

   The star here though, despite Tracy’s top billing, is Wagner, who is in almost every scene as the decent loyal son, and holds his own opposite the likes of Tracy (Wagner knew many of the Old Hollywood elites well, including Tracy who he had caddied for when he was younger) and Widmark. He played opposite O’Brian in The White Feather, so this was old home week in some ways.

   It’s no easy task for a young actor to even stay on the screen with the likes of Tracy (they played brothers in The Mountain) and Widmark, but he does it with ease. He was always at ease on screen, perhaps too much so for his own growth as an actor, but here he more than manages the unenviable trick of having to hold the screen when viewers are waiting for more of Tracy and Widmark.

   Incidentally there is a quiet scene with Tracy and Widmark that is almost a masterclass in two screen naturals subtly battling for screen dominance and coming to a draw without either of them ever once slipping out of character or crossing the obvious line into scene stealing. Widmark’s quiet self assurance on screen with Tracy, expressed in his relaxed posture, even adds to the tension between their characters in the film.

SHIRLEY JACKSON – The Haunting of Hill House. Viking, hardcover, 1959. Popular Library, paperback, 1962. Reprinted many times. Film#1: Argyle, 1963, as The Haunting (director: Robert Wise). Film #2: DreamWorks, 1999, as The Haunting (director: Jan de Bont).

   Eleanor is lonely. Very, very lonely.

   A 30ish shy caretaker for her now dead mother, she lets a room in her sister’s house.

   Lucky her, she sees an ad. A professor is looking for volunteers to spend the summer at a well-known supposedly ‘haunted house’ to research psychic phenomena and prove the existence of the paranormal. Room and board included.

   Eleanor’s got nothing better to do. So writes back to the PO Box, steals her sister’s car and drives out to the house.

   There’s a group of four: Professor, Eleanor, another unattached young woman, and Luke, an eligible bachelor who stands to inherit the estate.

   The house is labyrinth. Lots of doors and halls and connected rooms, many without windows. It’s nearly impossible to navigate. It’s dark. The heavy doors won’t stay open.

   Inexplicable noises appear in the night. The doors shake. They’re coming for me. I should let myself go. Then they’ll leave you alone, Eleanor says to the others. They’re only after me.

   One night, Eleanor’s name is found written on a wall. Urging her to come home. Maybe she wrote it herself.

   But I have no home, says Eleanor.

   This is my home.

   The home wants me here.

   Eleanor begins to believe, more and more, that she belongs. Finally, she belongs. She must stay here forever.

   Her erratic behavior is interfering with the Professor’s investigations. She’s becoming very annoying to the others. They ask her to leave.

   But she can’t.

         ___

   Can’t say I loved it. It was okay. A bit of a slog. And, in a haunted sense, nothing much happens. On the other hand, the subtlety of the haunting, the blurring of ghosts and schizophrenia, makes it more believable. I guess if it wasn’t called “The Haunting of Hill House” and was just called “Eleanor Goes Insane,” I’d have liked it more.

   Now have read both this and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I prefer. It is about 2 eccentric lonely sisters in a dilapidated old mansion at the center for a conservative little town. One is a beautiful and waifish maiden, thought by all to have been the murderess of the remainder of their family. The other, an ugly, impish creature, thought to be dumb, but with a hateful, plotting mind. I suppose I like it more because I believe in insanity more than I believe in ghosts.

RAOLD DAHL – Someone Like You. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1953. Dell #F139, paperback, 1961. Reprinted many times.

   Roald Dahl’s short stories have been called-among other things — bizarre, comic, horrific, clever, and playful. Dahl depicts a world where things are a little — or sometimes a lot — skewed from the world we know, and the events he chronicles often produce wrenching horror in his reader. But he has also been known to inject a comic twist into his stories, and he toys with the reader, teasing the story line along like a mischievous child until he has us completely fooled.

   Perhaps his most famous story is “Lamb to  the Slaughter.” It begins on a deceptively quiet note, with Mary Maloney waiting in her cozy parlor for her husband to come home from work. Mary is a devoted housewife, six months pregnant, and she takes excellent care of her policeman husband, but tonight she has neglected to take anything out of the freezer. And when she does, after her husband makes a startling announcement, a leg of lamb seems quite appropriate …..

   “Taste” likewise deals with food. Mike Schofield, a London epicure, is giving a dinner party to which he has invited a famous gourmet. Mike is proud of his wine cellar and anxious to trip up his guest on his knowledge of fine but obscure vintages. In fact, he is so sure of his ability to do so that he makes a most dangerous wager.

   These first two stories are examples of Dahl’s lighter work. On the more serious side is “Man from the South,” which concerns a different, more deadly wager. In “The Soldier,” Dahl makes a subtle statement about the aftermath of war. And readers and writers alike will be both amused and shaken at the implications of “The Great Automatic Grammatisator.”

   This collection shows Dahl at his best. Other volumes of his varied and multifaceted short stories include Kiss, Kiss (1960), The Best of Roald Dahl ( 1978), and Tales of the Unexpected (1979). In addition, he has written two novels: Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen (1948) and My Uncle Oswald (1979).

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

AMOR TOWLES – A Gentleman in Moscow.  Viking, hardcover, 2016. Penguin Books, softcover, 2019.

   I just spent two pleasant weeks in the company of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, and feel duty-bound to recommend in the most glowing possible terms that the readers out there avail themselves of his companionship. He can be found at the Metropol Hotel, in (where else?) Moscow, anytime between 1922 and 1956.

   The count is thus so readily and consistently available owing to the fact that in the first chapter he is tried by the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (This is in 1922, when the Revolution was still fresh) and sentenced to Life under House Arrest. Since he’s been living at Moscow’s luxurious Hotel Metropol, that would seem none too bad, but he’s unceremoniously moved from his regal suite to a tiny room in the belfry, barely large enough to stand upright and move around in, which will be home base in his hotel-world for the next thirty years. Nothing daunted, Rostov sets about turning his gilded cage into a vantage point from which to see and savor Life.

   The novel that ensues from this premise is four-hundred-and-some-pages of pure pleasure, mostly because Towles writes like a man who enjoys writing, and conveys that joy with vivid descriptions of food, drink, rare warm days, starry Moscow nights, beautiful women, good movies (He even picks out a moment in Casablanca I never noticed!) good deeds done by important people, and great things done by good people.

   Don’t get the notion, though, that this is Rebecca of Metropol Hotel.   Towles takes us through the idealism and chaos of the Bolsheviks, to Stalin’s genocidal reign, Hitler’s invasion, and the ascent of Khrushchev. And he conveys the lethal idiocy of bureaucracy to chilling effect, as some of those nearest to Rostov find their life’s work — and their lives — tossed aside by the arrogance of the genuinely stupid.

   A Gentleman in Moscow is a complex and richly varied work, even one that requires some effort from the reader. But it rewards the effort with characters who come alive on the page, and with a tale you won’t forget.

PACIFIC BLACKOUT. Paramount Pictures, 1941. Robert Preston, Martha O’Driscoll, Philip Merrivale, Eva Gabor, Louis Jean Heydt, Thurston Hall, J. Edward Bromberg, Mary Treen, Monte Blue, Rod Cameron. Screenplay: Lester Cole & W. P. Lipscomb. Story by  Franz Spencer (Franz Schulz) & Curt Siodmak. Directed by Ralph Murphy.

   As Seattle prepares for its first city wide blackout of the pre-War era replete with the Army providing bombers to drop faux weapons, Robert Draper (Robert Preston), a young inventor who has been working on range finder for the Army, is on trial for murdering his partner, and it looks bad for him, what with French nightclub singer Marie Duval (Eva Gabor) swearing he is guilty, though he swears he never met her.

   John Runnel (Philip Merrivale), an expert on blackouts, is advising the city and a friend of Draper’s, but there is nothing he can do when Draper is convicted and sentenced to death (they move fast in B -movies).

   While being transferred to prison that night as the blackout begins, there is an accident and Draper escapes, and while trying to find a way out of his handcuffs, he meets Mary Jones (Martha O’Driscoll), who is walking her dog in the park.

   Mary is one of those screwball types you could only find in a movie of this era, and in short order she is helping Preston in his escape through a series of misadventures that fill up most of the movie a la a more urban 39 Steps (one of the most oft repeated plots in Hollywood history, even by Hitchcock).

   About midway through, the big secret regarding the villain is revealed, but it isn’t until right at the end we discover the McGuffin: saboteurs have substituted a real bomb for one of the phony ones to be dropped on Seattle by pilot Rod Cameron’s unsuspecting crew.

   To the extent this works its because of Preston and O’Driscoll, and a decent performance by a young Eva Gabor as the French girl whose testimony has been extorted by the unexpected German spy behind the whole thing. J. Edward Bomberg has a nice bit in a medical treatment shelter as a slight of hand artist turned pick pocket who helps Preston out in a tight.

   I’m curious if there ever was a blackout quite as extravagant as this one, but being on the West Coast and knowing Spielberg’s 1941 was loosely based on fact it is just in the realm of possibility (probably not with bombers dropping bags informing kids they have just been killed by poison gas).

   This is by turns screwball comedy, spy thriller, murder mystery, and patriotic flag waver, but makes so many sudden turns you may get a little dizzy trying to follow it. It never manages to all come together, but individual bits are worth seeing, and Preston is always good.

THE CLOSER. “Pilot.” TNT, 13 June 2005 (Season 1, Episode 1). Kyra Sedgwick (Brenda Leigh Johnson), J. K. Simmons (Will Pope), Corey Reynolds, Robert Gossett, and a large ensemble cast. Guest star: Allison Smith. Written by James Duff. Directed by Michael M. Robin. Currently streaming on HBOMax.

   One of the bigger hits on cable non-network TV, The Closer was on for seven summers on TNT before transforming itself into Major Crimes, a spinoff which continued on and lasted for another six years. You can’t tell me why I’m so slow, because I don’t know myself, but when I watched this, the pilot for the first season, it was the first episode I’ve ever seen of either series.

   And now I’m kicking myself, as I enjoyed this one immensely. As all good pilots do, it introduces the major players clearly and emphatically, while at the same time telling a good story, one with a bit of a twist at the end. Admittedly we do get to know the lesser members of the ensemble cast only in passing. To all intents and purposes, this is a one-woman show, Kyra Sedgwick as no-nonsense, ass-kicking Brenda Johnson, who is hired from outside to head up LAPD’s Priority Homicide Division.

   Her blunt personality wins her no friends on the force. Other than Brenda’s new boss, Will Pope, who hired her, all of the others turn in their resignations about 20 minutes into this first episode. I don’t know how long into the season it will take for her to win all of them over for good, but by the time she’s cracked her first case, it appears that she’s received at  a small modicum of respect, at least, grudgingly as it may be.

   And as far as the case is concerned, when the mutilated and burned body of a woman is found in the home of a high-tech millionaire, who has disappeared. Strangely, none of his fingerprints are in the house, only the victim’s. Brenda’s trademarked final closing scene is what it takes to induce a confession from the killer, an ending that clearly and forcefully delivered, the first of many to come.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The D. A. Breaks a Seal. Doug Selby #7. William Morrow, hardcover, 1946. Previously serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in seven part between December 1, 1945, and January 12, 1946.  Pocket Book #869, paperback, 1952. Cardinal C-292, paperback, 1958.

   Thanks to HBO if not the long-running TV series in the 1950s and 60s, everyone in the know knows about famed defense attorney Perry Mason. Not so many have heard about Gardner’s series character who plied his trade on the other side of the aisle, Doug Selby, the District Attorney for Madison County, California, some small distance from the bright lights of L. A., Madison City being a small blip in the larger scheme of things.

   But to be honest, Selby is a major in the U. S. Army all through The D. A. Breaks a Seal. He’s on leave and heading for his next assignment when decides to hop off the train and see how the folks he left behind. Rex Brandon is still the sheriff, and Selby’s nemesis, defense attorney A. B. Carr is still making headlines, both in LA and in Madison City. There’s a new D.A in town, of course, but he’s having a tough time making people forget Doug Selby.

   The story begins with two people getting off the same train that Selby arrives on, standing out first by the simple fact they’re wearing white gardenias, then by A. B. Carr showing up and obviously seeking them out. Selby’s lady friend Sylvia Martin, a reporter, senses a story, and she’s right. Soon after, a man is found dead in a local hotel room under strange circumstances, and somehow A. B. Carr is involved in that, too – as well in a local legal case about a contested will.

   Lots of detective work ensues, unofficially by Selby, and courtroom drama as well, this time officially. The legal matters are, as always in Gardner’s work, supremely complicated, but he, as usual, makes me believe I know what’s going on all the way through.

   There’s even a hint of romance in the air – Sylvia is not the only woman in town who remembers Doug with fondness — and Gardner even takes the time to talk about what the country should be like after the war.

   There’s lots to like with this one.