Speaking of The Old Days (wasn’t I?), back when I first got interested in Movies there were maybe a dozen books on the subject, mostly very shallow or abstrusely academic. A recent visit to the Library, though, reminded me how much times have changed. On fifty full shelves filled with books on movies I found detailed reference books, books devoted to single films, and a variety of carefully researched works on highly-specialized topics like science fiction serials, the “Road to” movies, Abbott Costello’s horror spoofs, and The Films of the Bowery Boys (Citadel, 1984) by David Hayes & Brent Walker.

   Now I don’t recommend the Bowery Boys to anyone; the humor is crude and forced at the best of times, and at their worst, the films are so shoddy as to defy their own existence. But I find them possessed of a raw energy and persistent vision that cannot be denied, and I confess I watch them every chance I get.

   The Boys started out in the New York production of Sidney Kingsley’s classic play Dead End, and when the property went to Hollywood in 1937 they went with it, where they were billed as the “Dead End Kids” in films like Angels with Dirty Faces until Warners lost interest, whereupon they took a step down to Universal as “the Little Tough Guys” for a series of “B”s and hung around for a couple of serials. In 1940 they osmosed into “the East Side Kids” at Monogram, and coalesced into the Bowery Boys in 1946, the form they remained in until the series demise ten years later.

   By this time, there were only two real members of the group: Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, plus a changing roster of hangers-on, frequently abetted by Leo’s dad Bernard, as Louie Dumbrowski, owner of the minimalist soda shop where the boys hung out. In this universe the “Boys” – now quite middle-aged and looking every misspent minute of it – went through a series of situations frankly quite beyond their B-movie budgets, but impressive nonetheless, with romps through London, Paris, the Orient, Olde Englande, Africa ….

   They were also visited by every character actor with a few free days and some bills to pay. The roster will mean little to non-addicts, but those of us who once worshipped the grainy black-and-white images think fondly of Noah Beery, Erle Blore, Hillary Brooke, Iron Eyes Cody, Lloyd Corrigan, John Dehner, Douglas Dumbrille, Douglas Fowley, Steven Geray, Billy Gilbert, Mary Gordon (from the Sherlock Holmes movies) Raymond Hatton, Percy Helton, Warren Hymer, Ian Keith (once considered for Dracula) Bela Lugosi (who got the part and ended up here anyway), Fuzzy Knight, Martin Kosleck, Sheldon Leonard, Keye Luke from the Chan films, J. Farrell McDonald, Mike (Murder My Sweet) Mazurki, Alan Napier, Sig Rumann, Dan Seymour, Lionel Stander Craig Stevens, Glen Strange, Woody Strode, Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, Minerva Urecal, Lee Van Cleef and Clint Walker True, we remember them from much better films, but here they are nonetheless, plugging along in cinematic obscurity.

   The authors somehow manage to document all this, watch the films and do research on a series to which respectable critics wouldn’t give the time of day. And, as with the Boys themselves, one must admire their perseverance.

   Incidentally, one of the Bowery Boys movies actually received an Academy Award nomination, which it turns out is not exactly the same as being nominated for an Oscar, which is the basis of an amusing story which unfortunately cannot be related here.

RUTH FENISONG – The Butler Died in Brooklyn.Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover 1943. Mystery Novel Classic #97, digest-sized paperback, 1946/47. Stark House Press, 2-in-1 edition with Murder Runs a Fever, softcover, 2024.

   Fenisong wrote thirteen books about New York Police Sergeant (later Inspector) Gridley Nelson from 1942 to 1960. They enjoyed considerable popularity and many were reprinted in paperback. In an era of uneducated but street wise fictional cops, Nelson has just about everything going for him. He is a Princeton graduate with a substantial private income that allows him to hire a full-time housekeeper who lives in Harlem and serves as an information pipeline through her friendships with other servants. This is of enormous value to Nelson since he is frequently assigned to investigate upper-class murders.

   In The Butler Died in Brooklyn, tangled upper-class family relationships arc involved when Beulah Fitch Casey Danille Roberts’s longtime butler, Shepard (who had just been fired without cause), is found murdered. “Booming Beulah” has just moved her entire household — including giddy granddaughter Marianne and her twin brothers — from Gramercy Park to a recently converted apartment house to be near her current husband’s antique shop/warehouse.

   After another family murder, Nelson’s housekeeper, Sammy, takes it upon herself to answer an ad for a maid in the household. Proper police procedure is followed, with long interrogation of suspects and extensive background checks, while Marianne complicates matters by trying to protect her brothers and getting herself kidnapped. It is the dogged, step-by-step investigation by Nelson, and Sammy behind the scenes, that finally solves the case just in time to prevent another murder.

   Fenisong’s books, even the non-series ones like Jenny Kissed Me ( l944), are a mixture of romance and suspense, and provide glimpses of how the other half lives. Her formula of the wealthy young police officer who “speaks the language” has been used by others, but never more successfully. Among Gridley Nelson’s other successful cases are Murder Needs a Face (1942), Deadlock (1952), and Dead Weight (1962).

     ———
   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.

HARRY HARRISON – Deathworld 3. Dell #1849, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1968. Cover art: John Berkey. Ace, paperback, 1987. Serialized earlier in Analog SF, Feb-Mar-Apr 1968, as The Horse Barbarians.

   Jason dinAlt convinces some of the inhabitants of the planet Pyrrus (Deathworld 27) to attempt resettling on Felicity. Rich mineral deposits await them, but the native barbarians make the new planet only slightly less unfriendly to new off-world settlers. Their culture is that of warring tribesmen, cities are [restricted] by traditional laws, and death by following the law is [definitely an] obstacle.

   The Pyrrans attempt infiltration of the most powerful clan, led by Temuchin, but they discover that cultural change can come only from within, and that defeat can lead to final victory.

   Too much of the story is spent on the wrong approach, which would be acceptable if bloodshed were an approved form of entertainment. [Worse], Jason has on page 21 a computer capable of providing the necessary conclusions, and it is not until page 167 that it even appears in the story again. The emphasis on fighting and violence is not justified, […] with the latter breaking out over and over again.

Rating: ***

CHARLES PERRY – Portrait of a Young Man Drowning. Simon and Schuster, hardcover, 1962. Signet, paperback, February 1963. W. W. Norton & Company, softcover, 1996. Film adaptation: 1997 as Six Ways to Sunday, starring Norman Reedus and Deborah Harry

   A bildungsroman of Harry Odum, from a child with an Oedipus complex, to mob hitman. And everything in between.

   I guess it’s really two different story arcs, one literal, one figurative: the rise and fall of a mother-fucker.

   So it all starts relatively innocent enough. Mama loves her baby. And she doesn’t want him to love anybody else more than her. And she doesn’t ever want him to leave her. And he must always care for her. As she did for him.

   And as a kid it doesn’t look that weird. But as mama starts driving off all eligible bachelorettes, chastising her full grown son for his divided attentions—things start to get weird.

   And at the same time, we see Harry growing from small-time hoodlum to big time enforcer. And with the money he’s bringing in, he can bring Ma to the top o’ the world Ma, top o’ the world.

   And he does.

   Of course when you get to the top, you got much further to fall.

         —

   Beautifully orchestrated Oedipal mob story, where a child’s development into a psycho-killer is inextricably intertwined with his twisted sexuality, to the point that he can only be aroused by murdering someone. And only then and immediately must he find a mate, a mate denied by his mother, til she’s the only one left.

   Pretty hard core stuff. But well done.-

WILLIAM LINDSAY GRESHAM – Limbo Tower. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1949. Paperback reprints listed below.

   Crime fiction fans know Gresham for his 1946 classic noir novel Nightmare Alley and nonfiction classics on carnival/magician culture (Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls and Monster Midway: An Uninhibited Look at the Glittering World of the Carny). In 2010, Bret Wood released Grindshow: The Selected Writings of William Lindsay Gresham (see Walker Martin’s Mystery*File review here for more details).

   Few people today know about Gresham’s second novel, Limbo Tower, although it had some commercial success. My copy (William Heinemann, 1950) is the second hardcover edition, and Signet/New American Library published at least three paperback editions (Signet 839 in 1951, Signet D2046 in 1962, then a reprint of D2046 in 1973).

   It’s a curious mix of crime thriller and melodrama. The limbo tower in question is an urban tuberculosis clinic—TB is a harsh disease, so the quarantined patients are in limbo between life and death. For the main character, Jewish atheist Communist poet Benjamin Rosenbaum, the rest-and-nothing-else routine is torture. He’s got words to write and systems to smash.

   Catholic nurse Anne Gallagher struggles to care for him well because she can’t admit she’s in love with an atheist. Other patients—most notably Muslim cab driver Abdullah, con man Jasper Stone, and fundamentalist preacher Joe Kincaid—orbit around Rosenbaum, amusing or irritating each other. Meanwhile, Dr. Rathbone struggles with being a skilled surgeon in a job where his options to cure patients are limited. His colleague, Dr. Crane, strives to hide an affair with a woman whose boss is on the hospital board.

   Many interesting things could be said about how the novel connects with Gresham’s real life. Gresham spent about six months in tuberculosis wards (leaving against doctors’ advice) in 1939-1940. He dedicates the book to Alexander F. Bergman, a poet who died of tuberculosis and was “a genius, a revolutionary, and an expert at handling small boats. God rest him, he’s dead now.”

   Readers familiar with Gresham’s wife, Joy Davidman (she later married C.S. Lewis, a romance depicted in the movie Shadowlands) will know she edited They Look Like Men, a collection of Bergman’s poetry. All interesting things that biographers and researchers are still unpacking today.

   The more interesting topic for crime fans is how much Limbo Tower feels like it wants, and doesn’t want, to be a crime novel. Wood (and Alan Prendergast in a Writer’s Chronicle piece) observe that the tuberculosis setting and ensemble cast make Limbo Tower resemble Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. I found it felt more like a mix between Jim Thompson’s The Alcoholics and Elmore Leonard’s Touch.

   Like The Alcoholics, it’s an ensemble clinic story with noir elements, yet its subject matter announces that it’s meant to be “serious literature.” In Gresham’s case, the crime comes via hints that preacher Kincaid has sinful secrets and Dr. Crane’s affair with a femme fatale who talks like the brunette in Detour.

   In Thompson’s case, the crime comes via his usual tropes (women with odd sexual interests, heroes with unmentionable dark pasts), just in a clinic instead of his usual small Texas town. Yet Thompson makes his goal fairly clear: he highlights the fact the clinic is a “California gothic” style building, his ensemble cast resembles a gothic novel’s quirky mansion residents, and the essential dilemma is over accepting much-needed money from a crooked source (“how will we maintain the mansion?”).

   This is noir returning to its gothic roots. Gresham’s much longer, rambling story doesn’t have such clarity: there’s a lot of talk about religion, allusions to people’s criminal pasts, and some vague hints of supernatural phenomena, but it never coheres into a clear vision. In both cases, attempting to write a self-consciously serious novel feels like overreaching. Thompson and Gresham seemed at their best when they took a pulp novel setup (con jobs, bank heists, etc.), then quietly made it more radical.

   Like Leonard in Touch, Gresham offers a curious mix of piety and grit. Leonard isn’t strictly a noir writer, although his trademark messy urban characters and snarky humor seem to build on noir’s legacy of fast-talking crooks—hence why Tarantino liked Leonard so much.

   In Touch, a novel about hucksters exploiting a Franciscan priest whose stigmata can heal people, Leonard wants to be simultaneously snarky and reverent. The religious elements aren’t scorned, as we’d expect from someone who wrote Rum Punch. Similarly, Gresham (writing during the tail end of his 1946-1950 churchgoing Christian phase, contributing testimonies to Presbyterian Life about how much C.S. Lewis’ apologetics informed his faith journey) takes faith seriously here. Readers familiar with Nightmare Alley, where the con artist hero poses as a spiritualist minister, keep waiting for a reveal where the faithful turn out to be fools. Instead, even Rosenbaum’s angry Communist tirades against religion are treated as misguided faith. Leonard and Gresham both try to combine writing styles known for irony and cynicism with pious treatments of religion. Neither quite pulls it off.

   So, Limbo Tower is a messy book. That being said, Gresham provides some memorable scenes—including a wicked twist in Dr. Crane’s love life. The descriptions of the hospital—particularly the biblical allusions to Babel/Babylon as its furnace burns contaminated sheets—are also fun. The characters could use a stronger plot to orbit around, but they are all intriguing. As readers saw in Nightmare Alley, Gresham had a knack for making a community of characters feel like the universe in microcosm.

   Maybe now that Guillermo del Toro has made Nightmare Alley into a movie and some lesser-known Gresham works have crept back into print (Dunce Books re-released Monster Midway in 2021), we’ll see new interest in Limbo Tower. I’m unsure how well a reissue would sell, but I can see a smart adaptor playing with the structure to make a compelling audiobook or graphic novel.

         ____

About the Reviewer: G. Connor Salter is a writer and editor living in Colorado. He has contributed over 1,400 articles to various publications, including Mythlore, The Tolkienist, and Fellowship & Fairydust. His interview with mystery author Clayton Rawson’s son was published here earlier in Mystery*File.

BRETT HALLIDAY – The Violent World of Michael Shayne. Mike Shayne #51. Dell 9334; paperback original; 1st printing, November 1965. Ghost written by Robert Terrall. Cover art by Robert McGinnis. At least one reprint edition.

   Mike Shayne is hired by a senator’s daughter to come to Washington and frighten away a widow intent on blackmail. Senator Hitchcock is chairman of a subcommittee which is investigating the awarding of a big airplane contract, and certain lobbyists could be capable of arranging compromising situations.

   The widow’s background is not entirely clean, enabling Shayne to finish that part of the job easily enough. But he carries his investigations a bit further, murder results, and all his preconceptions are proven wrong.

   Bribery and blackmail in Washington may be real enough, but this book couldn’t convince anyone of it. The characters are standard: unsavory investigators, crooked lobbyists, industrialists willing to look the other way, and one dishonest senator. Shayne works the whole case suffering from lack of sleep, an easy excuse for messing around for as long as he does. If he was confused, pity the reader.

Rating: **½

STRANGERS KISS. Orion, 1983. Peter Coyote, Victoria Tennant, Blaine Novak, Dan Shor, Richard Romanus, and Linda Kerridge. Written by Blaine Novak & Matthew Chapman. Directed by Matthew Chapman.

   A niche film, but accessible, engaging, intelligent — and Funny!

   About 30 years before Strangers Kiss was made, an eager young would-be filmmaker borrowed money, assembled a cast of non-actors, investors and their relatives, scarfed up one professional actor and somehow cobbled a movie together.

   No, not Ed Wood and Plan 9 from Outer Space. The laying of that egg was immortalized in a movie of its own, a decade later. This film is about the somewhat more talented Stanley Kubrick, and the movie was Killer’s Kiss, reviewed here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=18638

   So if you’re still with me, Strangers Kill is loosely based on the making of Killer’s Kiss. For purposes of the plot, and to give the thing a sense of movement and suspense, they provide the leading lady/heroine with a loan shark/movie-investor for a near-husband, and Richard Romanus gives the character a hairy machismo that contrasts very well with Blaine Novak’s laid-back virility as her co-star /would-be lover.

   But these three, good as they are, compete for our attention with a vivid array of sub-Hollywood types, hangers-on or drop-outs from the fringes of the tinseltown dream, limping Kharis-like from ruin to ruin…

   Lyrical, ain’t I?

   Seriously, folks, the minor characters are well-drawn, and the bigger roles are played with commitment and deft comic timing. Dan Shor does an amazing — and very funny — job as a beleaguered producer in an abusive relationship with the director, played by Peter Coyote as a mercurial megalomaniac. The scenes of Coyote plowing through the film like a mulching mower, while Shor bags up the remains are a delight to watch, funny and deeply-felt at the same time.

   Finally, for a movie about movie-making, this is surprisingly intelligent. Director Matthew Chapman evokes the seedy back-lot milieu, and lovingly recreates scenes and set-ups from the earlier film. And best of all, ((WARNING!)) after teetering at the edge of melodrama for most of its running time, Strangers wraps with everyone acting like grown-ups, resolving their conflicts (or not) with a low-key maturity that surprised me more than many an action-film!

KENNETH FEARING – The Big Clock. Harcourt Brace, hardcover, 1946. Reprint editions include: Bantam #738, paperback, 1949. Ballantine, paperback, 1962. Perennial Library, paperback, 1980. Films: Paramount Pictures, 1948; Orion Pictures, 1987. Added later: Police Python 357, French, 1976. (See comments.)

   A poet of considerable stature and ability in the Twenties and Thirties, Kenneth Fearing turned to the writing of novels in 1939 and to the psychological] thril1er in 1941 with Dagger of the Mind. (This novel, set in a summer artists colony, caused something of a stir when it was first published: Raymond Chandler, for instance, in his famous essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” called it “a savage piece of intellectual double-talk.”) In all, Fearing wrote five novels that can be considered criminous — by far the best of which is The Big Clock. This quintessential tale of psychological suspense is so good, in fact, that labeling it a small masterpiece would not be unjustified.

   It is told in that most difficult of narrative techniques, multiple first-person viewpoints. Most of the story, however, is related by its chief protagonist, George Stroud, a reporter for Crimeways, one of a chain of magazines put out by Janoth Enterprises. Stroud is a sensitive man, a man who hates the pressures and conformity of his job, his slavery to what he cal1s “the big clock”; he yearns to be more like his boss, Earl Janoth. Janoth, with his “big, pink, disorderly face, permanently fixed in a faint smile he had forgotten about long ago,” doesn’t have to live by the dictates of the big clock. He doesn’t even know there is a big clock, Stroud reflects.

   But that is before the night Stroud happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the night Earl Janoth murders his mistress, Pauline Delos: Stroud is the only person who knows his employer is guilty. This is only the beginning of his troubles, however — for Janoth knows that somebody saw him that night. Under the guise of performing a public service, he mobilizes his staff in an all-out campaign to find out who it is. And the man he assigns to head the task force is George Stroud himself.

   The suspense that Fearing builds from this situation through skillful intercutting of scenes told from Janoth’s viewpoint and that of other members of his staff, such as Steve Hagen, Edward Orlin, and Emory Mafferson — is the kind that keeps you up into the wee hours turning pages. But The Big Clock is more than just a fine thriller; it is a novel of character and metaphysical insight in which the symbol of the big clock takes on more and more significance and ultimately becomes the focal point of the story.

   Almost as good is the 1948 film version directed by John Farrow and featuring brilliant performances by Ray Milland as Stroud and Charles Laughton as Earl Janoth. It has been hailed, and rightly so, as one of the best noir films of the Forties.

   Fearing’s other suspense novels are worth investigating, although anyone who has read The Big Clock first will find them something of a letdown. The best is Dagger of the Mind; the others are The Loneliest Girl in the World (1951), The Generous Heart (1954), and The Crozart Story (1960).

     ———
   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.

WILLIAM L. STUART – Night Cry. Dial Press, hardcover, 1948. Avon, paperback, 1949. Avon #597, paperback, 1954. Basis for the film noir Where the Sidewalk Ends, directed by Otto Preminger from a script by Ben Hecht and starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. Adapted for TV: Kraft [Mystery] Theatre, NBC, 13 August 1958. starring Peter Falk and Jack Klugman.

   Ken Paine just came back from WWII, a war hero, and now he’s adrift. He’s drinking and gambling and generally making an ass of himself. He gets in a fistfight with some jerk at the gambling joint, knocks him out, and leaves. Later that night, the jerk winds up dead. Paine is suspect #1.

   Lieutenant Mark Deglin is on the case. A tough cop who doesn’t take shit from anybody. Deglin tracks down Paine. Paine pretends he knows nothing about the murder—and he gets surly when the cop tries to push him around:

   
   Okay. Well big deal. A murderer gets killed resisting arrest. It’ll be okay.

   Deglin calls in to report to the captain, who says: Oh you can forget about Ken Paine. We got a full confession from the murderer! Ken Paine is no longer a suspect.

   So at this point Deglin has a choice to make. Admit that he killed an innocent man. Or hide the body.

   Paine’s dead anyway. Whatever Deglin does, it ain’t gonna bring him back. So why should Deglin suffer, derailing his promising career? He decides to dump the body and make it look like Paine split, dumping the weighted body in the Hudson.

   Of course it’s all well and good long as the body stays sunk. But bodies rarely stay sunk in a crime novel. And this body no exception.

   So the body is found. And guess who is assigned to the case?

   Yep. Deglin is chasing after a murderer who is himself. But now, instead of an arguably victimless crime, this time Deglin’s gonna have to frame somebody.

   The question is, just how bad a Bad Lieutenant is Lieutenant Deglin?

   It turns out not nearly bad enough. And his ambivalence alternatively haunts him, and tempts him, while he struggles to decide how far he’s willing to go. And how much he’s willing to risk and suffer for a choice long past chosen.

         —

   It’s a good, tough novel. Not sure I buy the ending, which is a bit too cute. But other than that, a solid hardboiled read. On the other hand, when an author blows an ending, asking me how I like it is a bit like asking Mrs. Lincoln, other than that, how was the play?

ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION. August 1967. Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover art by Chesley Bonestell. Overall rating: 2½ stars.

POUL ANDERSON “Starfog.” Short novel. Ranger Daven Laure is assigned the task of returning a lost spaceship and its crew to their home planet. Complications arise since they have some from a strange region of space, a globular cluster, where abundance of stellar matter and sheer closeness of stars make ordinary navigation impossible. Lots of meat for the astrophysicist, but the story fails to inspire the ordinary reader, Quite boring. **

CHRISTOPER ANVIL “Babel II.” The next world crisis will be caused by the inability of scientists in different fields to communicate. Pertinent, and the analogy is apt. (3)

FRANK HERBERT “The Featherbedders.” Novelette. A race of telepathic beings think Earth would be useful for their purposes, but they don’t quite suspect they’re being exploited in turn. (3)

WALT & LEIGH RICHMOND “Cows Can’t Eat Grass.” A stranded space scout uses bacterial symbiosis, such as a cow does, to survive. (3)

MACK REYNOLDS “Depression or Bust.” A national depression is trace from its very roots. The solution” Go back to that family that started it all. Too long. [21 pages]   (2)