THE GREEN HORNET “The Silent Gun.” ABC, 09 Sep 1966 (Season One, Episode One.) Van Williams (Britt Reid / The Green Hornet), Bruce Lee (Kato), Wende Wagner (Lenore Case), Lloyd Gough (Mike Axford), Walter Brooke (D.A. Frank Scanlon). Based on the long-running radio series created by George W. Trendle. Directed by Leslie H. Martinson.

   I remember waiting for a long time with a lot of anticipation for this series to begin, so I’m rather sure I was among those in the viewing audience with it finally came on the air. (It finally came to fruition by the tremendous success the Batman series had at the time.)

   I was disappointed then, and now. Before watching this first episode again after spotting it on YouTube earlier this month, I never turned it on again and did my best to forget it. (Without going into details, may I say I succeeded rather well at that, as I remembered none of the details.)

   For those of you younger than I, and perhaps totally unfamiliar with the show, here’s the opening bit of narration for the TV series:

   
   This first episode does all right in introducing the characters, but the story itself, is well, to put it bluntly, is pure dreck. It has to do with a new gun in town, one the works silently and without a flash. Two opposing gangs of mobsters in town want their hands on it, and it’s up to The Green Hornet and Kato to act as would-be go-betweens to foil the aspirations of each.

   And that’s it. They succeed, thanks to the smash-’em-up contributions of the Black Beauty (see the narration segment above), with nary a twist or interesting point to be made of any kind. I kid you not.

TED WHITE – The Spawn of the Death Machine. Paperback Library 63-680; paperback original; 1st printing, July 1968.  Jeff Jones cover art. Warner Books, paperback, April 1974.

   Sometime after Chaos, the computer-complex know as the Death Machine sends Tanner out into the world to report on the state of humanity. Tanner is superficially human, but he has non-human superpowers that at times isolate him from the humans he finds. Some are savage barbarians, others are pioneer frontiersman, but the group he and the girl Rifka finally find have developed empathetic powers and seem to be the future of the race.

   Tanner’s memories of the pre-Chaos past haunt him and contribute to his worries about his quasi-human condition. That he is human is proven by the birth of his son, but he must learn to live with his discovery that it was he who helped decide that destruction must precede rebirth for the human race.

   The violent story of an outsider, realistic in treatment of both violence and sex, equated with humanity. Very easy to read, but also lacking in depth, and no deep conclusions result.

   Nero Wolfe is a popular character, The Mayor of New Mercer, later brutally killed by Tanner, has the same physical characteristics and habits (page 93). And what becomes of the town after his death? Tanner passes through, destroys, and goes on.

Rating: ***

CHICAGO CONFIDENTIAL. United Artists, 1957. Brian Keith, Beverly Garland, Dick Foran, Douglas Kennedy, Paul Langton, Elisha Cook Jr. Based on the book by Jack Lait & Lee Mortimer. Director: Sidney Salkow.

   This one’s for Brian Keith fans. In Chicago Confidential, Keith portrays intrepid and noble minded District Attorney Jim Fremont who is tasked with both prosecuting union leader Artie Blane (Dick Foran) and later working to prove his innocence. Pivotal to the case are a forged tape recording, the testimony of a local drunk named Candymouth Duggan (Elisha Cook Jr.), and a perjuring witness.

   The movie relies on semi-documentary filmmaking (complete with a rather unnecessary voiceover by an unseen narrator) and police procedural tropes to create a suspense-filled motion picture. The themes: unions, racketeering, and the miscarriage of justice.

   Although he’s not the movie’s prime star by a long shot, Cook’s character does play a pivotal role in how the story unfolds. His portrayal of a down and out alcoholic in Chicago Confidential reminded me how talented a character actor he truly was. There’s a harrowing scene in which he is taken by mob thugs to an overpass and is thrown to his death. It’s memorable not only for its violence, but for the manner in which Cook carries himself throughout the grim proceedings.

   Another character actor of note in the movie is Jack Lambert who portrays one of the mob enforcers. He was in a lot of movies and TV shows, often playing a tough guy. He has memorable features and there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen him in something you’ve watched.

   Final verdict: Overall, it’s not exceptional by any means, but it nevertheless works well enough for a 1950s crime film about union corruption. Recommended for those who find that sub-genre particularly compelling and, as I mentioned above, for Brian Keith fans. He’s good here.

ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. September 1967. Overall rating: ***

ELLERY QUEEN “Wedding Anniversary,” Ellery Queen’s final return to Wrightsville is marred by murder  and revenge striking after death. (3)

FRANK GRUBER “Eagle in His Mouth.” Process server Harry Ives finds a dead with a rare penny in his mouth, a la Black Mask. (3)

PATRICK QUENTIN “Mrs. B’s Black Sheep.” Short novel. Previously published in The American Magazine, March 1950, as “Passport for Murder.” Mrs. Black’s European Tour, conducted for wealthy debutantes, is threatened by murder. The clues point to someone closely connected with her group, and she fears the worst. Easy to read. (4)

STEVE APRIL “The Greatest Snatch in History.” A plan to kill the President fails. Ha. (2)

      [Note: Steve April was another pen name for Len Zinberg, aka Ed Lacy.]

ROBERT L. FISH “The Adventure of the Missing Three Quarters. Schlock Homes somehow helps invent the miniskirt, Good puns, but I really don’t understand. (3)

ARTHUR PORGES “Murder of a Friend.” Selby of the OSS is given a dirty job. Elementary topology. (2)

LARRY MADDOCK “The Death Wish.” Psychological bunk leads to a job as a hired killer. (1)

JAMES LEASOR “The Seventy-Sixth Face.” First published in Vogue, November 1 1965, as “Doctor Love Strikes Again.” Jason Love helps catch an international jewel thief. Full of trivia. (1)

REV. NORMAN E. DOUGLAS “The Washing Machine.” First story. An impoverished minister turns to crime. (5)

JOHN PICK “They Said It Couldn’t Be Done.” First story. And safecracker Tony Lepula couldn’t. Good atmosphere. (4)

YOUNGMAN CARTER “Alias Mr. Manchester.” A criminal is busted by a policeman’s anonymous letters. {3)

SUSAN SEARS “A Tale from the Chaucer.” The Chaucer is a village coffeehouse. Its owner has to take on a free-lance detective job to solve a folk singer’s murder, (3)

FRANK SISK “The Shadow of His Absence.” Richard thinks his twin brother Robert has disappeared, but he has no twin brother. (1)

WILLIAM BANKIER “Traffic Violation.” Policeman turns down $20,000 to help his prisoner escape, but $20 to a delivery boy does the job. (5)

NEDRA TYRE “In the Fiction Alcove.” Murder in the library is solved by a page. (3)

RICHARD FORREST – A Child’s Garden of Death. Lyon & Bea Wentworth #1. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1975. Pocket, paperback, 1977. Dell, paperback, 1982.

   Take one children’s-book writer who is also a hot-airballooning enthusiast; add his fictional creations, the Wobblies, and his politician wife, plus his best friend from Korean War days, now police chief in their small Connecticut town. These staple ingredients of Richard Forrest’s series about Lyon Wentworth add up to an intriguing mix-even before the element of murder enters.

   In this first entry in the series — whose titles are variations on well-known children’s books — Lyon is called in by buddy Rocco Herbert to help solve an unusual type of killing: a thirty-year-old murder of a man, woman, and child whose bodies are uncovered by a bulldozer at a construction site. Rocco often relies on his friend’s “unusual kind of mind,” but this case is particularly painful to the writer. His own daughter was killed by a hit-and-run driver some years ago, and he and his wife have yet to come to terms with their loss.

   Lyon’s investigation — which he frequently discusses with his imaginary friends, the Wobblies — takes him back to World War II and into a reconstruction of the life of a Jewish family who fled Hitler’s Germany only to find horrors in the new world. And the resolution of the case brings a measure of peace to the Wentworths. An excellent and sensitive novel whose serious theme is leavened by a wry good humor.

   Other titles featuring Lyon Wentworth: The Wizard of Death (1977), Death Through the Looking Glass (1978), The Death in the Willows (1979), The Death at Yew Corner (1980), and Death Under the Lilacs (1985).

     ———
   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.
   

NOTE: The series has continued on to include the following titles:

7. Death On the Mississippi (1989)
8. The Pied Piper of Death (1997)
9. Death in the Secret Garden (2004)
10. Death At King Arthur’s Court (2005)

SHOCK. 20th Century Fox, 1946. Vincent Price, Lynn Bari, Frank Latimore, Anabel Shaw, Michael Dunne, Reed Hadley. Director: Alfred L. Werker.

   Vincent Price plays a mad doctor in this one. But not a mad doctor as in a horror movie mad scientist. Rather, Dr. Cross (Price) is a seemingly mild mannered psychiatrist with a successful career. But he’s also having an affair with a nurse colleague (Lynn Bari) and has his share of anger issues.

   And when his wife threatens to spill the beans on him, he snaps and kills her with a silver candlestick holder. Little does he know that there was a witness to the crime, one Janet Stewart (Anabel Shaw), who was in the same hotel as Cross while awaiting her husband’s return from a POW camp after the end of the Second World War.

   When her military officer husband finds her, Janet is in a state of shock. Apparently witnessing Cross murder his wife was too much for her mental state. And guess who gets called in to help with her mental health woes? You guessed it. The very same Dr. Cross. Yes, the doctor tasked with tending to a psychiatric patient is a murderer, she’s a witness, and no one will believe her. That, in a nutshell, is the core of the film.

   Price is in true form as a smug, calculating, and devious physician who is so corrupted by his love for his nurse that he’s willing to breach every moral code to get his way. Fortunately, an intrepid police investigator (Reed Hadley) is not so enamoured of the doctor’s charms and has his own suspicions about how and why Cross’s wife was murdered.

   Shock is a relatively short film (some 69 or 70 minutes), but packs a lot into it. Even though the movie doesn’t touch upon politics, it feels very much like a post-war paranoid thriller. Recommended.

https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-26/the-one-hundred-pages-strategy.

   Some nagging medical issues will keep me from posting here for another few days. I’ll be back as soon as I can!

VALLEY OF THE ZOMBIES. Republic Pictures, 1946. Robert Livingston, Lorna Gray (as Adrian Booth), Ian Keith. Director: Philip Ford.

   By the title alone, you might think this was a horror movie set in Louisiana or Haiti with menacing zombies at every turn. In this case, however, you’d be wrong.

   In fact, I’m not even sure that there is a single legitimate zombie in this Republic Pictures programmer. Rather, there’s a criminally insane man named Ormand Murks (Ian Keith) who has come back from the dead to take revenge on those who have wronged him. He has a thirst for human blood, making him more a vampire than a zombie. I guess technical definitions weren’t that important to the filmmakers. Vampires? Zombies? Who cares? Just make the villain unexplainably spooky and hope the audience slops it up.

   But don’t less this oversight dissuade you. Valley of the Zombies is a fun, supernatural thriller with a romantic duo of doctor and nurse (Robert Livingston and Lorna Gray) playing sleuths. When their boss is killed by Murks, they begin to seek answers. Along for the ride are some bumbling (and not so bumbling) detectives and policemen who don’t believe for a minute that an undead man may be behind a recent spate of murders.

   There’s some humor in the film as well, including a giant cop named Tiny. It’s all dismally mediocre B-film material, but as I said before, it’s actually kind of silly fun.
   

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH – Strangers on a Train: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, January 19, 2021. Introduction by Paula Hawkins. First edition: Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1950.

   Guy Haines isn’t sure what will happen when he gets off the train to meet his estranged wife Miriam. Her track record of infidelities should make divorce simple, but if she’s pregnant, she may make things awkward for Guy and his soon-to-be fiancée.

   When he commiserates with Charles Bruno in the train dining car about his situation, he doesn’t pay much Bruno’s talk about having an insufferable father and how two people could “trade murders.” After police find Miriam’s strangled body in an amusement park, Bruno reappears, demanding that Guy “hold up his end of the deal.”

   Strangers on a Train is Highsmith’s first published novel, so there are moments where her style feels unvarnished compared to later works (Deep Water, the Tom Ripley novels). But she already knows how to create a vivid scene, especially the inner torments as her hero agonizes over how to escape Bruno’s game.

   While later books were more obviously literary (The Talented Mr. Ripley riffs on Henry James’ 1903 novel The Ambassadors), she already shows a clever ability to invert crime fiction into something stranger. Paula Hawkins’ introduction to this 2020 edition highlights how scarily Highsmith encourages readers to question what makes murder wrong, or if it is so bad after all.

   Hawkins also highlights how Highsmith uses a “pared-back, laconic style” to describe horrible crimes as well as everyday things (the sort of casual tone about murder contemporary readers associate with writers like Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk). Put these elements together, not to mention the fine line between hate and love Hawkins notices is very thin indeed in some Highsmith stories, and this book becomes far creepier than it appears.

   If Highsmith is important to noir, and it’s probably impossible to talk about the genre without mentioning her, it’s because she excels at handling this ambiguity. Where other novelists draw clear lines between stalker and victim, tempter and innocent, she quietly suggested that these characters may be more similar, more drawn to each other, than they want to admit.

   It may not feel transgressive as Ellis, Palahniuk, or later female virtuosos like Gillian Flynn, but Highsmith was a master at producing a thriller that slowly invites readers into something more genre-bending and perverse than they expect.