This is the second in a series of three reviews covering movies that were made for TV in the 1960s and 70s, the heyday of such film-making. Most of them were no more than ordinary, to be sure, but a few were well above average — small gems in terms of casts, plotting and production.

   Previously on this blog: How I Spent My Summer Vacation (1967).

RUN A CROOKED MILE. Universal/NBC-TV, 18 November 1969. Louis Jourdan, Mary Tyler Moore, Alexander Knox, Wilfred Hyde Whyte, Stanley Holloway, Alexander Knox, Laurence Naismith, Ronald Howard. Teleplay: Trevor Wallace; director: Gene Leavett.

   Richard Stuart (Jourdan) is a tutor who stumbles onto a murder in a remote English mansion. When he comes back with the law, the body is gone and he is ridiculed.

   Certain he isn’t mad, he returns to London and hires a private detective, Stanley Holloway. Shortly after that he discovers a key to a room in the mansion, and is knocked unconscious.

   When he wakes up, he finds he is on the Cote d’Azur, and his name is Tony Sutton, a wealthy playboy who took a blow to the head while playing polo. He’s married to the beautiful American heiress Elizabeth Sutton (Mary Tyler Moore) and he has lost five years of his life.

   Who can he trust? Is his wife part of the conspiracy? Just what nest of snakes did he stumble into five years earlier?

   Obsessed with finding out he returns to London to find Holloway now quite well to do and the Yard’s Inspector Huntington (Howard), not interested. Nevertheless he perseveres follows the clues back to the mansion owned by Sir Howard Nettington (Knox) and with Elizabeth’s help solves the mystery, uncovers a conspiracy, and brings down the high placed villains.

   I suppose you do have to wonder why he would be so anxious to solve the murder of a stranger and risk a very good life with a rich and beautiful wife who loves him despite the fact he hasn’t been any prize as Tony Sutton, but if people behaved normally in these things, nothing would ever happen.

   Run a Crooked Mile is a clever sub-Hitchcock exercise in the Buchan vein with handsome sets, and a fine cast. It moves quickly and relies on the considerable charms of Jourdan and Moore to get through whatever lags in logic that might plague you.

   It’s one of those films where almost no one is quite who they seem to be, but it is done with such style and competence that it plays more like a feature than a made-for-TV film. Of the three films that will be reviewed herem it probably most deserves release on DVD.

   It’s smart, funny, and suspenseful, attractive to look at, and much more literate and intelligent than it has to be. Howard, Knox, Whyte, Holloway, and Naismith all contribute nicely to the fun. In many ways it plays like a good episode of The Avengers, droll. literate, and full of twists.

Coming soon:

   Probe (1969), with Hugh O’Brien and Elke Summer.

   The sixties and early seventies were the heyday of the made for television movie, and while most were tired and unimaginative, a few gems did emerge. The three films I’ll be covering in a series of upcoming posts featured excellent casts, intriguing plots, and above average production values.

   As far as I know none of them have been on VHS or DVD, but that should be changed. They were all superior entertainment. All three aired originally on NBC.

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION. Made for TV. Universal/NBC-TV; telecast 07 Jan 1967. Robert Wagner, Jill St. John, Peter Lawford, Lola Albright, Walter Pidgeon, Michael Ansara. Teleplay: Gene R. Kearney; director: William Hale.

   Aging hip graduate student Jack Washington (Wagner) is in Europe living on the fringes of the Jet Set when he meets Nikki Pine (St. John) and begins to pursue her. At first her charming father billionaire Ned Pine (Lawdord) and mother (Albright) seem like nice people, but when Jack gets serious he finds himself out on his ear, framed for a crime he didn’t commit and roughed up.

   Out of revenge he begins compiling a dossier on Pine, and soon finds himself up to his ears in trouble with a army of killers out to get him led by Pine’s top man Pucci (Ansara). Lewis Gannett (Pidgeon) the Pine’s lawyer knows where the bodies are buried — literally — and is fed up with Pine’s murderous ways, Jack hopes to use him it get the secrets of who Pine is.

   Vacation is a slight but entertaining little fable that plays heavily on the charm and skill of its cast and is rewarded by being a fast paced film much slicker and better than many that found their way to the big screen. As Wagner’s Jack changes from aging hipster to amateur James Bond, the film grows darker and ends in a nice slam bang finale that leaves Jack in the catbird seat.

   This sort of fluff can go wrong quickly, but thanks to the cast and script doesn’t. Lawford does a nice sinister turn and Albright is darker than she is painted. Even St. John shines in what could have been a throwaway role.

Coming soon:

   Run a Crooked Mile (1969), with Louis Jourdan and Mary Tyler Moore.

   Edward Candy (Barbara Alison Boodson Neville, 1925-1993) spaced her mysteries widely: two in the first part of the 1950s were followed by two more in the 1970s. Her Words for Murder, Perhaps (Gollancz, 1971; Hogarth Press, 1985) is subtitled “A Detective Story,” but as the most recently published book among those being now reviewed, it is not one in the Golden Age sense: it would appear not to be the author’s objective to fairly challenge the reader.

   But the tale is quite a pleasant one, a neat puzzle in an academic setting. Gregory Roberts (misidentified on the dust jacket as Robert Gregory) lectures at Bantwich University, and teaches also in the “Extra-Mural” (adult education) department.

   He’s about 40, living with his mother after barely surviving a disastrous marriage and ensuing cuckolding, attempted suicide, psychiatric treatment, and divorce. Now his cuckolder and ex-wife’s present husband disappears, and the ex-wife receives a typewritten excerpt from an elegy in the mail.

   Signs seem to point to Roberts, who’s presenting Detective Fiction to a class of adults, including Nan Jones, a widow who seems to be reviving the youth of his soul. Then a fellow extramural lecturer dies of cyanide, amidst evidences of another elegy. Police continue to sniff about, Roberts fears his life is coming unglued, and death marches on…

   Death on the Cliff (Benn, 1932) is my first exposure to Thomas Cobb, who produced a number of works in our field during the Golden Age. Cliff is not a brilliant representative of its hallowed era: the puzzle is neither baffling nor compelling, the detection is slight, the people are not fascinating, and the rural English setting is ordinary.

   Lady Roperson, whose 50ish husband is straying regularly from the connubial fold, is found dead on the rocks at the bottom of a cliff near their home. “Misadventure,” says the coroner’s jury – but Margaret Fairbrook, the dead woman’s daughter, immediately turns on her step-father, and Susannah Roperson (his daughter) develops an awful sense that murder has been done. Especially after a second death at almost the same spot as the first.

   A private detective (once of the Yard) comes into the picture but plays a minor role. The truth emerges as Susannah comes to ask the right questions of the right people.

   It’s been established that Sefton Kyle was an alter ego for Roy Vickers, who achieved a certain currency in this country when discovered by Ellery Queen. So I was interested to try one of the Kyle novels (none of which was ever published in this country): Red Hair (Jenkins, 1933).

   Although from the publisher’s plot summary this appeared to be wholly non-criminous, a perusal proved this not to be the case. A murder occurs early and is pivotal to resulting events (though the reader knows at once who did it), and Kyle/Vickers/David Durham’s series Insp. Rason is our contact with Scotland Yard. (Rason’s adventures were chronicled under all three bylines, although the good inspector’s first initial seems to vary from book to book.)

   The book is basically a gothic, and provides all the frustrations of the species. Secretary Patricia Ridge marries her politically rising boss, Sir Brennan Grantley, then discovers his first wife – long thought dead – has resurfaced.

   Instead of confiding in Grantley, she tries to save his career, embarking on a course dotted with deception, theft and murder – a quagmire in which her every effort at extrication results in increased danger. Of course, all ends well as expected. Not recommended.

   Charles Ashton was another Golden Age practitioner not known in this country. My first sampling was Death Greets a Guest (Nicholson & Watson, 1936).

   Here a regular meeting of a rural archeological society at Squire Eastwood’s Heatherling Hall is interrupted by a sudden downpour. And by murder: a guest, an artist who accompanied a regular member, is found shot in Eastwood’s summerhouse.

   It seems that no member can be guilty, that no motive exists, and that premeditation could not have been possible. Colonel Bretherton, Chief Constable, and Inspector Williams are baffled, but Major Jack Atherley, champion cricketeer and amateur sleuth, is on hand to sort matters out.

   Competent, readable, pleasant, and quite forgettable.

   NOTE: Go here for the previous installment of this column. Unfortunately this marks the end of this particular grouping of reviews, which were first published on the main Mystery*File website some four years ago. It was my thought that reprinting them here on the blog would bring fresh attention to them. By all accounts, it has. Thanks to everyone for their comments over the entire eight installments!

   A few weeks ago Turner Classic Movies presented yet another film of the Thirties which, had it been made in the Forties, would have been accepted by everyone as film noir.

   I refer to Crime and Punishment (Columbia, 1935), based on Dostoevski’s classic novel. For obvious budgetary reasons director Josef von Sternberg makes no attempt to recreate mid-19th-century St. Petersburg, and we are told in an opening title that the story could take place at any time and anywhere.

   This is why the protagonist’s name morphs from Rodion to Roderick Raskolnikov, and also why we never see any automobiles or horse-drawn vehicles or any other form of transportation that might give us a clue to whether we are in the 19th or the 20th century.

   Amid grotesque shadows and bizarre camera angles, Peter Lorre in his first role after escaping from Hitler’s Europe played Raskolnikov — how could that whiny, sweaty, pop-eyed little toad have ever imagined himself to be an Ubermensch above the law? — while the police detective Porfiry Petrovich was played by Edward Arnold, who the following year would be cast, for one film only, as Nero Wolfe.

   If you missed the TCM debut of this version of Crime and Punishment, watch for it when next it’s shown.

   Speaking of Nero, it was my good fortune that I began reading Rex Stout in the late 1950s, when I was in my middle teens and also pigging out on a dozen or more TV Western series a week.

   Why was this a lucky break for me? Because one of those Western series saved me from misunderstanding Archie Goodwin.

   If you were following the Wolfe saga during the Hammett-Chandler era when the novels and novellas were first coming out, you might easily have tried to assimilate Archie to the legion of wisecracking PI/first person narrators of the time, and then rejected the character when you sensed what a poor fit that was.

   Even so astute a critic as John Dickson Carr, writing in 1946, referred to Archie as “insufferable” and a “latter-day Buster Brown.”

   But if you were fortunate enough to discover Stout in the late Fifties, at a time when millions of Americans including myself were watching Maverick every Sunday evening, you might have recognized Archie Goodwin and Bret Maverick as soul brothers.

   You might have credited Rex Stout with having created in prose the Great American Wiseass prototype which James Garner brought to perfection on film. You might have longed to see one of Stout’s novels filmed with Orson Welles as Wolfe and Garner as Archie. At least I did. What a shame that it never happened!

   When did TV movies begin? The first films that networks called by that name were broadcast in the fall of 1964. But if a TV movie is a feature-length film that tells a continuous story and was first seen in a single installment, the genre dates back at least to the suspense thrillers and Westerns that were aired one week out of four, beginning in the fall of 1956, as part of the prestigious CBS anthology series Playhouse 90 (1956-61).

   As a young teen I watched some of those films. Until recently the only one I had revisited as an adult was So Soon to Die (January 17, 1957), starring Richard Basehart and Anne Bancroft and based on the novel of the same name by Jeremy York, one of the many bylines of the hyper-prolific John Creasey (1908-1973).

   A few weeks ago I came upon another, one that I hadn’t seen in more than half a century. The Dungeon (April 10, 1958), written and directed by David Swift, starred Dennis Weaver as a man who, after being acquitted of murder, is kidnapped by a psychotic ex-judge and locked up in a cell in the attic of his isolated mansion, along with several other acquitted defendants.

   A great noir premise and a great cast to boot — Paul Douglas, Julie Adams, Agnes Moorehead, Patty McCormack, Patrick McVey, Thomas Gomez, Werner Klemperer, the list goes on and on. And the tension is heightened by the magnificently ominous music of a never credited Bernard Herrmann.

   I wish Swift had provided a backstory to explain what turned the judge into a sociopath, and my mind, not to say my nose, boggles when I start wondering how his prisoners (one of whom has been held for more than a year!) ever showered or kept clean-shaven or changed clothes. But if you have the good fortune to find this film on DVD as I did, it’s well worth seeing and, thanks to Herrmann, hearing.

   The Poetry Corner has been on sabbatical lately but I need to bring it back in order to tout perhaps the finest detective novel to deal centrally with the subject.

   The author was Nicholas Blake, known outside our genre as C. Day Lewis (1904-1972), poet laureate of England and the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis. The detective, as always except in Blake’s non-series crime novels, is Nigel Strangeways.

   The title is Head of a Traveler (1949). Thomas Leitch in his essay on Blake in Mystery and Suspense Writers, Volume 1 (Scribner, 1998), describes the novel as “one of his most tormentedly introverted. The central figure is the distinguished poet Robert Seaton, whose household is destroyed by the unexpected discovery of his vanished brother Oswald’s decapitated corpse. The events of the fatal night remain obscure even after Strangeways’ final explanation; the real interest of the novel is in its impassioned examination of the costs of poetry — the lengths to which poets and those who love them will go in pursuit of their craft.”

   Anthony Boucher in his short-lived “Speaking of Crime” column in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (August 1949) was a bit less enthusiastic: “Blake knows so much about his theme, the nature of poetic creation, that he never quite conveys it convincingly to the reader.”

   Whichever critic is right, when it comes to the intersection of crime fiction and poetry, Head of a Traveler remains the “locus classicus.”

   A Stranger Came to Dinner by Andrew Soutar (Hutchinson, 1939) is a fairly vigorous specimen of the 1930s British thriller, involving London inquiry agent Phineas Spinnet in an espionage affair.

   At first sight it seems to involve only a straightforward murder, as Sir Peter Greebe is battered to death in his mansion while a bizarre collection of international guests is enjoying his hospitality. The Yard is invited in and Spinnet is hired by a newspaper to poke about and report.

   At least he does the former, and the case quickly becomes murkier. A Japanese house guest is found hanged in a sealed room in which there is no place from which the rope could have been suspended — but little is made of this impossibility and the solution is casually revealed. Spinnet’s role becomes official and involves, among other perils, a fall from an airplane and torture in Portugal.

   There seems to be some sinister threat against Britain, and the name of the mysterious secret agent known as the Buzzard (friend or foe? live or dead?) circulates. Spinnet, playing both ferret and bait, catalyzes a surprising resolution.

   Robert Machray‘s Sentenced to Death (Chatto, 1910) dates from an age when men were strong and silent and women pure. Its subtitle is “A Story of Two Men and a Maid,” and so it is.

   The maid is Zilla Barradell, pure and wealthy, who while taking the cure in the brine baths at Wyche meets one of the men. This is Halliday Browne, strong and silent, silent especially on the subject of his secret service activities in India, the sentence of death by Indian extremists which hangs over his head, and his growing love for Zilla.

   The other man is Fernando Valdespino, a weak villain with a penchant for losing money at cards. Zilla does not see beyond his handsomeness and allows him to spike her relationship with Browne. Meanwhile a plot to bring terror and violence to England has been uncovered, and Browne, as chief investigator and principal target, is drawn into the fray.

   Who are the nasties in this scheme and who, besides Halliday, are their targets, and where are they hiding out? A diverting period piece, straightforward and predictable, is this — a romantic thriller, not a detective story.

   I am well pleased with the first Paul McGuire tale I’ve read, Murder by the Law (Skeffington, 1932). McGuire seems to have a certain currency: Barzun & Taylor speak well of at least some of his works, and his books (especially those not published in the U.S., like this one) were (at least in my book-collecting years) both sought and scarce.

   The plot and setting in Law are certainly acceptable but not exceptional. Rather more significant are the characters McGuire sketches for us, and his skillful and evocative use of language, particularly in dialogue.

   One overly hot week of an English summer various people, including the curious folk of the New Health and Eugenist persuasion, gather at Bellchurch on the Sea. Also among the gatherers is Harold Ambrose, a poisonous novelist toward whom McGuire directs his most inspired venom. While someone else directs a blunt object…

   Ambrose’s battered corpse is found on the beach, and Supt. Fillinger — trailed by narrator Richard Tibberts and painter-sleuth Jack Savage — thrusts his elongate form into a social realm containing at least one satisfied and accomplished killer.

   Although Rogues in Clover by Percival Wilde (Appleton, 1929) is listed in ?Queen?s Quorum,? is hideously scarce (only this first hardcover edition was ever published, to my knowledge), and has been sought after feverishly by collectors with deadly glints in their eyes and bankrolls in their fists (I came by my copy in an curious fashion in a one-time visit with dealer/ author Van Allen Bradley), as one American entry in this set of reviews, it barely qualifies as marginal mystery/detection.

   We are introduced, in an opening chapter (?The Symbol?) to Bill Parmalee, son of a wealthy Connecticut farmer. Parmalee fled hearth and home to become a card sharper, pursuing a career of cheating which had its ups and downs, one of the latter finding him, unexpectedly, in his home town.

   He thought then to visit his widower father, who spurned him because of his life of crime. A duel over a deck of cards ensued, in which his father reawakened all those good instincts Bill had submerged, and Bill is then welcomed back into the paternal bosom.

   The remaining seven stories detail the cheating schemes Bill uncovers, usually in poker games and always at the behest of his woolly and wealthy friend Tony Claghorn. These are pleasant tales, nicely told with genteel humor and amusing insight into human nature, and they are better read as such than crime fiction.

   NOTE: Go here for the previous installment of this column.

   British author John Arnold perpetrated five mystery novels during the golden age of the detective story, but The London Bridge Mystery (Jenkins, 1932) is not detection at all. It’s a thriller, almost from end to end a chase story – on foot, by car, by motorcycle, in the water, instalment after instalment.

   There’s very little credibility in any of it, but it is possible to get caught up in the continuous action. David Royle, an innocent accountant, is taking the underground home one evening when a girl, pursued by “toughs,” gives him a cloakroom ticket, whispers an assignation, and bolts. The toughs turn their malevolent attentions on our hero, who also takes to his heels.

   Various comic and perilous episodes ensue as several groups seek the booty (fabulously valuable Chinese statuettes stolen from the British Museum). At length Royle finds someone who believes his story (an attractive and unattached young woman, would you believe?), and together they scramble for a way out of the maze, with Scotland Yard also at their heels.

   Elliot Bailey, a 1930s British author never published here, wrote several novels featuring Detective Inspector Geoffrey Fraser of New Scotland Yard.

   The second of these, following Death in Quiet Places, is No Crime So Great (Eldon, 1936). Here we find him wedded to Mary, whom he rescued from a killer’s clutches in the first book, and attending to a curious series of murders. Someone is taking deadly offense to England’s athletic heroes: one by one they are shot, just as the light of public acclamation shines most brightly.

   They all seem without personal enemies; what twisted motive could be at work? Fraser fastens his eye on a lame newsman who seems always nearby when bodies are produced, but there are other possibilities… No Crime is typical stuff of its day, satisfactorily readable but not outstanding in narrative style or plot or unexpectedness of denouement.

   They don’t come much more obscure than The Glory Box Mystery (Angus & Robertson, 1937) by G. W. Wicking. Aside from the obscurity of the author (apparently an Australian, who did indeed write other books), what’s a glory box?

   It proves to be a dower chest. I gather a dower is a widow’s life portion of her husband’s lands and tenements. There’s some irony in this, for when a clerk shows the box to a prospective purchaser in Melbourne’s Home Furnishers Emporium, it contains the corpse of one of the owners.

   Enter detective Dick Greenwood of the Criminal Investigation Branch. What follows is a fairly routine affair, with gradual revelation of the murderer and a final resolution that’s a bit surprising for the 1930s.

   Amusing and satirical and worth tracking down is Alan Melville’s Quick Curtain (Skeffington, 1934). Inspector Wilson of the Yard is in the audience when an actor plays dead with unseemly realism in the first act of the London premiere of “Blue Music,” a musical extravaganza staged by the redoubtable Douglas B. Douglas.

   The corpse is the star, the also redoubtable (if innocent of talent) Brandon Baker, whose fans number in the passionate hundreds of thousands.

    Wilson takes change in his own inimitable way, abetted and confounded by his journalist son, Derek. Wilson has an idea that the apparent killer (who committed suicide thereafter) is innocent, and accumulates evidence to prove his theory.

   Fortunately it all fits together SO neatly, even if rather messily for another member of the cast…

   Inspector Geoffrey Boscobell features in thirteen of Cecil M. Wills’ detective stories, and Fatal Accident (Hodder & Stoughton,1936; Ramble House, 2007) is about midway through the series.

   Here wealthy Stephen Merrivale successfully casts himself for death: he discards a tempestuous mistress, stands exposed in perfidy to his wife, drives from his home the photographer who has befriended his wife, and regularly antagonizes his nephew, whom he keeps on a very short leash.

   So Merrivale’s corpse comes as no surprise, except that he seems to have died in a car accident in which a random passing motorist may have been culpably negligent.

   These events in due course come to the attention of the Yard. Boscobell travels to the rural scene and finds a wealth of suspects, but the death stubbornly remains an accident, despite his instincts and efforts…

   Another generally competent product of the Golden Age, though the means of death is rather pulled from a convenient hat.

   The Griffith Case by John Bentley (Eldon, 1935) chronicles the second of nine investigations by Sir Richard Herriwell, noted antiquarian and amateur sleuth, whose “usual procedure is to accept a certain conclusion and then work back to prove it.” (The book is subtitled: “A Problem in Inductive Reasoning.”)

   He assists Scotland Yard’s Chief Inspector Barton, a bluff policeman not given to subtleties. Here Marcus Griffith, a wealthy and odious moneylender, is stabbed to death in his country residence.

   As with most unloved murder victims, various suspects appear; indeed, a confession is forthcoming in due course. But Herriwell is not satisfied… Nor, hugely, was I; this seems but an unremarkable product of detection’s golden age.

   NOTE: Go here for the previous installment of this column.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.]  Fender Tucker, head man at Ramble House, is doing his best to get some of these gems of the “Golden Age” back in print, and in fact some of the books he publishes are true First US Editions.

   Such is the case for Fatal Accident, by Cecil M. Wills. That’s the cover you see up above. My suggestion? Follow the link and encourage him to keep publishing books like this one!

   Hal Pink’s obscurity in this country is total. None of his thirteen books from 1932 to 1941 was published here, and I think Pink escapes notice in every commentary on the genre known to man or beast.

   So at least I wasn’t over-expectant in approaching The Strelson Castle Mystery (Hutchinson, 1939), but it turned out to be a cheerful, fast and gratifying read. No detective story, this; it’s a thriller, with bad guys and good guys clearly identified at the outset.

   The good guys are a trio of bachelors, vacationing in Europe’s vest-pocket kingdom of Zovania. The bad guys are trying to grab control of a mysterious fortune, apparently hidden somewhere in Zovania’s titular castle, which has just been inherited by beautiful British opera star Coralie Mayne.

   The fun begins at the Zovanian border, and then it’s pell mell action all the way, in two batches – since the chief villain, vanquished once, brews another rotten scheme and surfaces again in his sewer.

   Burford Delannoy wrote a number of volumes of crime fiction around the turn of the century, some of which are collections of detective short stories and vanishingly scarce. Denzil’s Device (Everett, 1904) is one of his novels and, for all its antiquity and stylistic peculiarity, it surprised me with its effectiveness, especially in the portrayal of odious villainy.

   The peculiarity lies in a pronounced tendency toward subjectless sentences (the subject of the previous sentence applies but is left unstated); this is compensated for by a wryly humorous turn of phrase. And while the basic outcome is fairly well assured from the outset, some uncertainty and suspense about details develops.

   Denzil is wealthy and evil. He lusts after the daughter of a judge, but she rejects him for an actor. Denzil’s device is a scheme to acquire the girl (willingly or not) and revenge himself upon the actor. For his purposes he makes use of a murderous lowlife and an embittered mimic; for his downfall the careful attentions of Detective Doyle and colleagues must be praised.

   My only reading of the works of Annie Haynes involves The Blue Diamond (Lane, 1925), which I found effective — surprisingly effective, even, in creating complexity and mystification and in arousing my interest.

   We meet the wealthy and titled Hargreaves, whose estate lies near Lockford in Devonshire, and who own the titular gem. A beautiful young woman, afraid and bereft of her memory, is found one night on the estate. The Hargreaves allow the woman to make the manor her home until her memory returns, or until her family can be traced.

   She soon wins the hearts of most of the household, especially that of Sir Arthur, the impressionable male head of the line who is just reaching his majority. No trace of the woman’s earlier existence can be found; her memory does not return. She stays on, and Sir Arthur’s swoon deepens.

   Not everyone, however, finds her credible, and the disappearance without trace (apparently through locked doors) of a nurse brought in to aid her recovery casts a pall on the manor. And brings in the police…

   NOTE: Go here for the previous installment of this column.

[EDITORIAL UPDATE] 04-13-09. There are few authors so obscure that no one recognizes their name. In spite of the fact that not a single one of Hal Pink’s fourteen mysteries is offered for sale online right now — I just looked — Bill Pronzini had this to say when this set of reviews first appeared:

    “One minor point in re Hal Pink: It’s true that none of Pink’s novels was published here in book form, but he was published in the U.S. A handful of his short stories appeared in such magazines as Mystery (The Illustrated Detective Magazine) and Street & Smith Detective Story in the early 30s. Pretty good stories, too.”

    Steve again: There’s nothing like a comment like that to prompt a checklist. I’ve come up with three stories from US magazines, but if someone more knowledgeable than I knew more about the British pulps than I do, I would expect the list to be a whole lot longer.

         The Blond Raffles, Mystery, February 1934.
         Bat Island, Mystery, March 1934.
         The Fires of Moloch, Detective Story Magazine, September 1939.

   Some time later, I heard from Christine Craghill, a relative of Mr. Pink’s whom I corresponded with for a while. I’ve lost contact with her, so I haven’t asked, but I hope she doesn’t mind my reprinting some of the information she found out about him. I’ve left out a good deal, but this is the essential data:

    “Hal’s real name was Harry Leigh Pink (Leigh being his middle name, given in respect of his step grandfather Edmund Leigh) and he was born in 1906 on the Wirral Peninsular in Cheshire, England. He was the son of my grandfather’s brother Frederick Pink and his wife Ethel. So I was right with my first hunch about him, he was my father’s cousin and therefore my second cousin. […] He died in Bakersfield [California] in 1973.”

   In her first email to me, Christine thought that Hal Pink’s name was really Percy Pink, which is the information that’s given in Part 31 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. This she corrected in a later email, having discovered that Hal and Percy were actually brothers.

   One last note: Hal Pink’s The Test Match Mystery (1941) is mentioned very briefly by Marv Lachman in an article he wrote called “A Yank Looks at Cricket and the Mystery Story.” Worth a look, I think, if you haven’t seen it before.

   My first sampling of British author John Laurence, The Fanshawe Court Mystery (Hodder & Stoughton, 1925), quite encourages me. This is a well-paced tale, nicely complex in plotting and properly mystifying.

   Sometime detective story writer John Martin is riding his motorcycle along a rural lane one rain-filled night, headed for home, when flagged down by the beautiful girl he’s worshiped from afar but not yet met. The girl has come through a forest path and urgently asks a ride to the station so she can catch the train to London.

   He helps her, and later learns that a reclusive local resident has been found murdered along that path. Why was he killed, and what roles do the girl and her dragon-aunt play? Supt. Barlow seems not to be making much headway, so Martin and a crime reporter do their own digging, as much to save the girl as anything else. Gradually threads of conspiracy, fraud, murder and revenge emerge.

   Ripe for Development (Cassell, 1936) is one of several novels by John Gloag about Lionel Buckby, and it’s a rather peculiar affair. Buckby has private money and only one passion: old furniture. He’s not very fond of the U.S…

   …and he’s one of the least perceptive protagonists in the genre. He gets mixed up with a crooked New York art importer and a pair of Chicago gangsters and never catches the drift. The results are nearly fatal – but New York’s Insp. Slamble, allied with the Yard at the end, comes to the rescue. The scheme has something to do with furniture bearing Buckby’s authentication being shipped across the Atlantic. Amusing in spots but not impressive.

   Another British author of total obscurity is Josephine Plain, who perpetuated three mysteries featuring Colin Anstruther in the 1930s. One of these is The Secret of the Snows (Butterworth, 1935), set in a Swiss mountain village.

   Detestable chemist Alfred Gitterson married a young and beautiful and fearsomely superficial wife and in due course got himself strangled on a mountainside. Or so it appears at first glance. At second glance circumstances change drastically and it seems physically impossible for only one person to have done the deed.

   Anstruther is providentially vacationing on the spot. He wants no part of the matter, but his old friend, Swiss detective M. Maraud, draws him in – and in any case Colin had suspected one of the principals of murder in an earlier case.

   Various characters are slowly revealed for what they are as Colin and Maraud struggle against an impossibility which gets worse the more they dig. Pleasant and well-written as this is, it neither plays fair nor convinces nor satisfies in resolving the puzzle.

   NOTE: Go here for the previous installment of this column.

   Of Lynton Blow I know absolutely nothing. The “Moth” Murder (Alexander-Ouseley, 1931; Holt, 1932) and The Bournewick Murders (Butterworth, 1935) appear to be the only traces he left in our criminous world, and they betray a fondness for plotting complexities and apparent impossibilities.

   Moth is perhaps the more interesting, and Bournewick the more baffling, though I found both quite pleasant British detection. In Bournewick Amelia Scott, an elderly though active woman living near the titular town, disappears; her strangled body turns up in due course. A suspect hoves into view, though the evidence is weakening; then he too is murdered.

   Another killing follows, and the Yard arrives in the person of Inspector Eldridge, who must tie together the multiple and seemingly unrelated murders and a mysterious mailbox fire, while the bodies continue to pile up: six die violently in this tale. Blow does break one of the cardinal rules of detective fiction here, but I found Bournewick sufficiently good that I can forgive him; the final resolution, though fanciful and not really of the fair-play variety, ties all together neatly.

   In Moth a burning plane crashes to earth near a coastguard station on Bournemouth Bay; the pilot, sole occupant, is burned to a crisp. Inquiries and an autopsy reveal that the victim is the famous airman, Charles Stafford, who took off with a female passenger (now vanished), and that the corpse died not of incineration but of a bullet in the brain.

   Inspector Hunt of the Yard also has other puzzles: a second plane, piloted by the wife of Stafford’s passenger, took off at the same time and vanished without a trace –- and a policeman was murdered on a rural road not far from the Stafford crash site on the same night. And more: Stafford’s heir turns up at the dead man’s home, stays a night, then disappears; there seems to be a curious link with a London drug gang; and then there’s that suitcase full of money…

   The U.S. dust jacket is criminally revealing, so avoid it, but not the book, which is fun 1930s reading.

   Frass by John Chancellor (Hutchinson, 1929) was my first exposure to the work of this author, who produced a number of novels in our genre from 1923 to 1970. Frass is a thriller, not a detective story; I can’t speak for any other of Chancellor’s fictions.

   Captain Frass left the sea, found a partner, and established a real estate business. But the captain was a bit naive: the residential plots his partner was peddling to earnest British burghers were just slightly offshore, and Frass spent a solo two years on the rockpile when the roof fell in.

   Now released, he’s approached by Roscoe Lengarde and his Prisoner’s Benevolent Society with an offer of employment. Frass resists for a while, then joins in; Lengarde has a nice smuggling scheme going, using pleasure vessels.

   Cracks rapidly develop in the operation, however: Frass discovers love, a conscience, a traitor in the ranks, and looming Excise men, in that sequence, and survival of the fittest becomes the order of the day. It will not surprise you to learn that the captain is quite fit (and survives for at least one sequel novel).

   This is competent crime-adventure, enlivened more than anything else by its subsidiary characters: the sniveling and cowardly Ginger Hoyst, the reliable follower Taunton, and the mad historian Peterson.

   NOTE: Go here for the previous installment of this column.

[EDITORIAL UPDATE.] 03-30-09. On the Yahoo “Golden Age of Detection” group, Juergen Lull points out that Lynton Blow’s The “Moth” Murder is available as an online etext at http://www.archive.org/details/mothmurder00blowiala.

   On the same venue, Doug Greene follows up with a comment, saying: “The Moth book seems to have been based on the famous disappearance over the channel of Alfred Loewenstein in 1928 — Darwin Teilhet used the same background in his Death Flies High (1931). The story can be followed in William Norris’s [non-fiction account of the mystery] The Man Who Fell from the Sky.”

   To this, Curt Evans adds the fact that Lynton Blow was a flight instructor, appropriately enough, verified by a search on Google and this page.