MIGNON G. EBERHART – The Patient in Cabin C. Random House, hardcover, 1983. Warner Books, paperback, 1985.

   This recent Eberhart novel is typical fare. Sewall (“Sue”) Gates, a young upper-class lady whom financial reverses have forced into nurse’s training, is plucky, determined, and genuinely likes being a nurse; but now she is offered the opportunity to gain financial security for herself and her harmlessly alcoholic aunt Addie by marrying wealthy Monty Montgomery.

   Monty. an entrepreneur who describes himself as a “peddler,” is only mildly alcoholic (compared to Addie) and quite well meaning, but Sue is not at all sure she wants to marry him. And she is still undecided when she and Addie board his yacht, the Felice, for a cruise that Addie believes is planned as a celebration of his engagement to Sue.

   The yacht — a sort of seagoing version of the country estate — has a full complement of passengers: Monty’s younger half sister, Lalie, a budding alcoholic herself; Sam Wiley, a man with heart trouble from whom Monty bought the yacht; Dr. Smith, head of the hospital where Sue took her training and apparently Wiley’s personal physician; Lawson, Monty’s attorney; Juan, the steward, who is not the deferential Chicano he seems to be; and two others, whose presence is ill-advised-Stan Brooke, Sue’s former heartthrob, whom Monty hired on impulse to skipper the yacht; and Monty’s former mistress, Celia Hadley. It is a menage just made for murder — and indeed, as soon as the Felice sets sail in a thick fog, mysterious events begin to happen.

   First Monty falls overboard, and swears he was pushed.

   Sue sees the steward sharpening an evil-looking hatchet. The ship’s engines quit. The steward disappears, leaving a trail of bloodstains. Monty remakes his will in Sue’s favor and begins talking monotonously and ominously about someone being out to get him. Addie remains foolishly drunk. A storm is brewing; Sue thinks of shipwrecks and sinkings, and Addie begins seeing things that may be more than just the product of the DT’s. Finally Sue, typical Eberhart heroine that she is, begins to detect-with the usual satisfying results.

   Like all of Eberhart’ s novels, this one is well crafted and well plotted, and her fans will feel right at home with the characters and situation. Sue Gates is not very different from Eberhart’ s heroines of the 1940s, and there is a curious, somewhat refreshing innocence to this seafaring tale. Perhaps the most surprising thing about The Patient in Cabin C is that it was written in the 1980s, rather than in those more gentle days.

         ———
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.

MANNIX. “Skid Marks on a Dry Run.” CBS/Desilu Productions. 23 September 1967 (Season 1, Episode 2). Mike Connors (Joe Mannix), Joseph Campanella. Guest Cast: Charles Drake, Marian Moses, Wende Wagner, Vincent Gardenia, Vic Perrin, Herbie Faye. Written & directed by John Meredyth Lucas. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

   I don’t think this happens often, but here we are only two episodes into the first season, and this one’s a dud. Or at least I think so. Let me tell you about it.

   It begins promisingly enough. A client comes to Intertect (the computer-oriented PI agency Mannix works for) with a strange request: he wants to be investigated himself. He’s running for office, he says, and he wants to be sure that no dirt can be dug up about him that the opposition can use to smear both him and his campaign.

   Well, OK, but between you and me, there’s more to it than that. Mannix is assigned the case. And even though the people he talks to from the client’s past know nothing and tell him nothing, they all seem to end up dead. It makes no sense, nor (as it turns out) neither does the basic premise. I don’t suppose I need tell you why, and I wouldn’t think of doing so anyway, but when the wheels are as wobbly on the car as it is on this one, you can bet your last fifty bucks it won’t go very far, and it doesn’t.

   But, and it is a big but, the show is still fun to watch anyway. I like the title, too.
   

JAMES GUNN – Deadlier Than the Male. Duell Sloan and Pearce, hardcover. 1942. Signet #709, paperback, 1949. Forthcoming from Stark House Press, softcover, April 2024 (intro by Curtis Evans). Film adaptation: Released as Born to Kill (RKO Radio Pictures, 1947, with Claire Trevor, Lawrence Tierney, Walter Slezak).

   Legend has it that there was a time where men were men and women were women. James Gunn is here to tell you that that time, if it ever existed, wasn’t in 1942.

Sam Wild is a man. A wild man, a man’s man, a ladies man. He’s redheaded, rough and tough and he smells like sweat.

   Mrs. Krantz runs a boarding house and lives for the lurid stories of her only friend: Laura Pollicker.

   Laura is a marginally wealthy, flaccid gigolo-monger, in ruffles. Picture Bette Davis’s Baby Jane trying to seduce you. She comes bearing gifts.

   Laura regales Mrs. Krantz with legendary lovemaking with her new beau: He’s redheaded, rough and tough and he smells like sweat.

   Sam Wild finds his benefactor with another gigolo, and goes wild, killing Laura Pollicker as well as his rival.

   The cops have no clues. But Mrs. Krantz is determined to sniff out the killer: “Laura was all I had. Laura and the bottle. There’s nothing I can do for the bottle, but I won’t let Laura down.”

   There’s a pretty funny scene where Mrs. Krantz tracks Sam Wild down, sits two rows behind him at the theater, trying to sniff him out, leans over the dividing row, sticking her huge ass high in the air, blocking the view of the other patrons, inhaling deeply at the smell of her prey, exclaiming: “Laura! I found him!”

   Sam Wild escapes from Mrs. Krantz, only to be ensnared by Helen, a blonde bombshell. And Sam, for all his animal force, realizes he’s lost to “the most beautiful smiling thing I ever saw, with a body like honey and a face that smiles. She sits and smiles and swings her legs, above me, above the world, knowing she’s better than anybody ever was, sure that she and her kind own the earth we live on. And they do. And she hates me.”

   But “Helen had had about enough of men sobbing on beds. She slapped his face, hard. He cringed as she leaned over him.”

   Helen is a femme fatale for the ages. She destroys everyone in her orbit and emerges unscathed, nay better, stronger, richer, more powerful than ever, by the end. A school of weak men drowned in her wake.

         —–

   I liked the book. Didn’t love it. But then again I already knew the femme fatale was deadlier than the male. It may have been news in 1942, but it’s a pretty well trodden path today. The reviews of the day showed the book by this 21 year old writer blew people away: “This Stanford Senior writes better than Cain ever wrote”, said John Selby in his syndicated book review. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze named it his favorite of the first 1000 serie noires.

   So ‘people’ love it. But it’s always hard to know what history was like before it happened. I’ve already seen Body Heat and many more like it. So I’m not surprised. But if readers of 1942 were used to Goldilocks, they had another think coming. A think which must have felt a bit like when Mrs. Krantz, “with all her might … jabbed up between his legs with her hatpin.”
   

BRANT HOUSE – Servants of the Skull. Secret Agent X #2. Corinth CR126, paperback, 1966. Cover art by Robert Bonfil. First appeared in Secret Agent X, November 1934. [Brant House was a house name used by several writers; in this case the author was Emile C. Tepperman.]

   The Skull’s plan is to kidnap ten heavily insured businessmen, then force [their] life insurance companies to pay for their release, rather than have them viciously murdered, X manages to take the place of a notorious safe-cracker and enter he Skull’s secret underground hideaway, but the capture of Betty Dale forces him to reveal [himself. He escapes, then returns as a kidnap victim before the Skull’s identities are revealed in turn.]

   Tremendously exciting, with the plot moving forward every minute. There are flaws, of course, if you must look for them. The Skull’s “servants” are decidedly of a poor caliber; no wonder he keeps them locked up almost as prisoners. At one time, Secret Agent X, in distress, asks the Skull if all the secret panels and the maze of passages are necessary. [Here’s what I’m thinking.] Not for a sane man, but how can a man with the Skull’s ambitions be sane?

Rating: ***

JOE GORES – Contract Null and Void. DKA #5, Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1997.

   I was more than a little disappointed in the last DKA book, 32 Cadillacs.  It was the first in the series in a number of years, and I was really looking forward to it — but it turned out to be a pure caper novel rather than the PI procedural I was expecting, and which earlier DKA books had been. So I started this one a bit apprehensively; not that the last one was bad, but it sure wasn’t what I wanted and expected from a DKA novel.

   DKA stands for Daniel Kearney Associates, a private detective agency run by, logically enough, Dan Kearney- — who is sleeping on an operative’s couch because his wife has kicked him out. For reasons that seemed good at the time, DKA has taken on the job of body-guarding a computer genius at his home because of recent attempts on his life. On his own, Larry Ballard — on whose sofa Kearney is sleeping — is looking into the disappearance of a union official, and this one gets rough in a hurry. And yet another operative is up in redwood country, trying to repo some large tires from a larger Swede.

   Gores and DKA are back to their old form, I’m delighted to report. The ensemble of Kearney, Giselle Marc, Ken Warner, Ballard, and O’Banion are all doing the things real private detectives do, and reinforcing Gores’ reputation as the only writer going who writes “realistic” PI tales.

   It takes an accomplished writer who juggles three stories and a number of frequently shifting viewpoints, but  Gores handles  it with aplomb and panache.  He doesn’t do flashy (at least with DKA), but he does damned good.

DAMON RUNYON “The Lemon Drop Kid.” Short story. First appearance: Collier’s, 03 February 1934.

   Damon Runyon (1880-1946) used to be a household name. He was famous for two reasons: his reportage, often covering some of the most sensational stories of the first half of the 20th century, and his fiction, featuring thinly disguised real people in occasionally outlandish situations, written in a narrative style uniquely his own.

   Nowadays Runyon’s reputation rests almost entirely in his “Broadway stories,” such as Guys and Dolls. People who knew Runyon well claimed his hardboiled exterior concealed a cultured and sensitive interior. In any case, he was friends with the infamous (Al Capone was a neighbor) as well as the famous (in accordance with Runyon’s wishes, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker flew low over Broadway and scattered his ashes over the district).

   One of Runyon’s “ironic mini-comedies” involves a racetrack tout named The Lemon Drop Kid. A tout, for the uninitiated, is a hustler who pretends he has inside information on an upcoming race (when, in fact, he has none), and who by getting some sucker to get in on the betting is able to clear a few “bob” for himself, the sucker usually being happy enough to cut the tout in on the winnings  —  but being very unhappy when the tip doesn’t pay off as advertised.

   This is called “telling the tale,” and The Lemon Drop Kid is normally very good at it.

   But on this particular occasion, The Kid accidentally misdirects his mark, and through a major misunderstanding takes it on the lam to escape what he mistakenly assumes will be retributive justice in the form of The Kid’s tender flesh.

   And so he literally runs away from the racetrack, with his mark in hot pursuit.

   Eventually, The Kid will find love for the first time in his life, but the experience will prove bittersweet . . . .

   Runyon’s story has been filmed twice, once by Paramount in 1934 with Lee Tracy, Helen Mack, and William Frawley (remember the growly landlord in I Love Lucy?); and a second time by Paramount in 1951 with Bob Hope, Marilyn Maxwell, Lloyd Nolan, Fred Clark, and William Frawley again.

   The 1934 version, we are told, adheres more closely to the original story. Those who have seen it say it starts out a comedy and ends up on a more serious note, very much like Runyon’s tale. The claim has been made that Paramount suppressed this film in favor of the remake.

   The 1951 edition takes the idea of The Kid misinforming someone about a bet and runs with it; the whole thing is played for as many laughs as possible (e.g., The Kid initiating a scam on little old ladies, Bob Hope in drag; you get the idea).

   Hope’s film also introduced a song that became an instant Christmastime standard, “Silver Bells.”

   To give you an idea of how much the 1951 movie differed from Runyon’s story, get a load of this list of characters’ names that never appeared in the original tale: Sidney Melbourne, ‘Brainy’ Baxter, Oxford Charley, Nellie Thursday, Moose Moran, Straight Flush, Gloomy Willie, Sam the Surgeon, Little Louie, Singing Solly, The Bird Lady, and Goomba. “Sidney Melbourne” was the moniker they gave The Kid and “‘Brainy’ Baxter” was gorgeous Marilyn Maxwell.

WILLIAM FAULKNER – Sanctuary. Harrison Smith, hardcover, February 1931. Modern Library, hardcover, 1932. Random House, hardcover, 1958 (revised and corrected). Reprinted as Sanctuary: The Original Text, edited by Noel Polk (Random House, hardcover). Reprinted as Sanctuary: The Corrected Text (Vintage Books, paperback, 1993; this is the edition currently in print). Film adaptations: The Story of Temple Drake (1933) and Sanctuary (1961).

   Temple Drake is a haughty girl, a naughty girl, daughter of a judge.

   She goes to an all-girls school with annoying rules which she breaks with impunity.

   She has a date with Gowan, a dapper dandy, a University of Virginia graduate with a cute convertible.

   Gowan’s a lush. And he insists on stopping at a still in the sticks for some moonshine. It’ll only take a minute.

   But Gowan gets shitfaced, crashes his car, and strands Temple at the still among the yokels.

   The yokels are fine as long as it’s daytime. But come night, the rapscallions all get drunk, horny and rapacious. No female is safe. Least of all Temple Drake. So she hides, unsuccessfully, from the men.

   One of the men, Popeye, takes her and then takes her away, shooting a competing suitor.

   You think Temple Drake is a helpless victim. A faux vamp scared straight from the depths of human depravity. But you’re wrong.

   Popeye, her abductor, is impotent. And Temple taunts him.

   At the end of the day, Temple is the last one standing. All the yokels go onto their reward. And Temple smirks. Mercilessly.

         —

   The book was a real freakin’ slog, I must say. Lots of technical Fauknerian wizardry, switched up POV’s, mélange of styles, cadence, speech patterns.

   Frankly, mental midget that I am, I found it distracting. My understanding is that No Orchids for Miss Blandish is a blatant rip-off. I can’t remember. Orchids wasn’t that memorable. But I guarantee you James Hadley Chase cut to the chase and told the story straight, leaving out the mumbo jumbo.

   Mumbo jumbo aside, Temple Drake is a great character. The story, when there’s a story being told, is gripping, white knuckling, and fearful. I’ll remember the story too. It’s a good story with a telling that gives you the vision of each character, with all the ramps and curls and squiggly lines of real life consciousness. It just wasn’t that fun deciphering it. It was work. But worth it.

… but I’ve been hacked. My laptop, my primary tool in the trade, is over at Best Buy even as I speak, in the capable hands of a trusted member of The Geek Squad. I hope. Won’t get it back till Monday. I hope.

I’m typing this on an old standby, a laptop that’s not only old, but slow, and worse, all the letters are worn off the keys. Touch typing is a skill I lost right after high school.

I’m going to take the weekend off. I’ll tell you more when I can.

ROLE PLAY. Amazon MGM Studios via Prime Video; 12 January 2024. Kaley Cuoco (Emma Brackett), David Oyelowo (Dave Brackett), Bill Nighy, Connie Nielsen. Directed by Thomas Vincent, written by Seth Owen.

   The Bracketts, Emma and David, are an ordinary mixed-race couple, with a couple of kids, but with a difference. He’s an ordinary husband, but she (Kelly Cuoco, previously of The Big Bang Theory) has a secret. She travels a lot, but she is not taking ordinary (boring) business trips, which is what she tells her husband. No, how she adds to the family’s mortgage account is by being a hitwoman. An assassin for hire.

   So she has a lot of things on her mind. Not only her job, but making sure her husband has no clue what her job is. It is no surprise that when she comes home from one of her “business” trips, she has committed the ultimate sin. She has forgotten their anniversary. Dave is forgiving, but they decide as a couple that their marriage needs some spicing up.

   The idea they come up with to accomplish this is the following plan. They will travel to New York, register separately under different names, planning to meet “accidentally” in the hotel bar, and spent an “illicit” night together.

   This is what is called role play.  You may have indulged in it yourself.

   Things go awry quickly. David is late in arriving, and while Emma is waiting for him in a bar, an elderly gentleman (Bill Nighy) starts chatting her up. In an ordinary way, but gradually with more and more of an edge. Menacing, even. Emma senses something is up, and before the night is over, the elderly gentleman is dead.

   This is maybe 20 to 30 minutes into the movie, no more than that, and from that moment on, the movie has nowhere in particular to go. Billed as an action comedy, it is in fact neither. The two leads have no particular chemistry together, and try as hard as I could, I could not convince myself that Kelly Cuoco (of The Big Bang Theory) is at all convincing as a hit woman for hire. The end result is amusing at best, but far from essential, even for fans of either of the two leading players.

   Your opinion, of course, may differ.

   Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot story “The Second Gong” (Ladies Home Journal, June 1932; The Strand Magazine, July 1932) was collected in The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories (1948). It was expanded considerably as “Dead Man’s Mirror,” which debuted in Murder in the Mews and Other Stories (1937) with three other novellas; Mews was published in the U.S. as Dead Man’s Mirror, initially minus “The Incredible Theft,” restored in 1987. Serialized in the London Daily Express (April 6-12, 1937), “Theft” was expanded from “The Submarine Plans” (The Sketch, November 7, 1923; The Blue Book Magazine, July 1925), originally collected in The Under Dog and Other Stories (1951).

   “Gong” is set on a single night at Lytcham Close, the ancestral home of musician Hubert Lytcham Roche, the last of his line, whose megalomaniacal behavior is either eccentric or certifiable, depending upon who is asked. Among his obsessions is punctuality at dinner, announced with a gong at precisely 8:05 and 8:15 P.M., and woe betide any guest who is tardy.

   It opens as Hubert’s nephew, Harry Dalehouse; Joan Ashby, invited at his behest by the “vague” Mrs. Lytcham Roche; and Geoffrey Keene, Hubert’s secretary, converge in the hall, having heard what Joan insists is the second gong, but although it is now 8:12, butler Digby says it is the first, dinner being delayed for 10 minutes by the late 7:00 train.

   Astounded at this unprecedented departure from tradition, they hear a sound, but cannot agree what it was—a shot, perhaps from a nearby poacher? a car backfiring?—or which direction it came from. They are soon joined by Hubert’s wife; adopted daughter, Diana Cleves, a distant cousin; and friend and financial advisor, Gregory Barling, yet when the second gong sounds, Hubert is not in evidence.

   As the drawing-room door opens at last, it is not he but Poirot who enters, then Digby reports that Hubert came down at 7:55 and entered the study, whose locked door Poirot has Keene and Barling force, revealing him dead of a shot that passed through his head and apparently shivered a mirror on the wall.

   The gun below his hand, locked French window, and paper bearing just a scrawled word, “Sorry,” suggest suicide, the conclusion reached by Inspector Reeves, who amiably says he needs no co-operation from the unconvinced Poirot. Yet his manie de grandeur is not consistent with suicide, and Poirot explains he was summoned by Hubert, who thought he was being swindled, declining to call in the police for “family reasons.”

   Barling says that Hubert was receptive to the idea of Diana marrying him and admits he is in love with her, yet she has “played fast and loose with every man for twenty miles around,” and has been “seeing a lot” of the new estate agent, Captain John Marshall, who lost an arm in the war.

   Di, who says she was in the garden when the shot was heard, calls Barling a crook, while Keene—seen with the “eyes in the back of [Poirot’s] head” picking up something outside the study—states it was a tiny silk rosebud from her handbag, and Marshall confirms that Hubert lost a bundle speculating on Barling’s “[w]ildcat schemes.”

   Poirot finds two pairs of footprints in the garden where Di had picked Michaelmas daisies for the table and later a rose to cover up a grease spot on her dress. Convening everyone in the study, he shows how jarring a loose mechanism can lock the French window from outside, then elicits the terms of Hubert’s will: Di inherits…provided a potential husband takes the family name.

   Yet a recent codicil stipulates that if said husband is not Barling, then Harry inherits, and Poirot “put[s] the case against” Di—who flirted with Keene to deflect attention from true intended Marshall—before he fingers Keene. Shot with a silencer, the fatal bullet hit the gong, heard only by Joan in her room above, and was later retrieved by Keene, who then dropped it under the mirror he’d cracked to help stage the scene, smoothing out Di’s first footprints in the flower bed to conceal his own; he later fired his revolver out the window before dashing from the drawing room into the hall, giving him his alibi for 8:12. Harry generously offers to halve the estate with Diana, disinherited for refusing to wed Barling.

   “Dead Man’s Mirror” features a return appearance by Mr. Satterthwaite, who was usually seen in Christie’s stories of Harley Quin but crossed paths with Poirot in Murder in Three Acts (1934), first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post (June 9-July 14, 1934) and then published in the U.K. as Three Act Tragedy. Adapted by ITV with David Suchet in 1993 for Series 5 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, “Mirror” backtracks to Poirot receiving the letter in which Gervase Chevenix-Gore imperiously summons him to Hamborough Close. At a duchess’s party, he seeks out Satterthwaite—given neither explanation nor introduction—to pump him regarding the old family (“Sir Guy de Chevenix went on the first crusade”).

   The novella also briefly describes his journey, but beginning with his arrival, many of the mechanics of the story, even specific passages, are anologous, with the usual renaming of characters (if not always in a one-to-one correspondence). Di, Marshall, Digby, Barling, Harry, and Joan are roughly equivalent to, respectively, Ruth, Captain John Lake, Snell, Colonel Ned Bury, Hugo Trent, and his girlfriend, Susan Cardwell. Keene is effectively bifurcated into secretary Godfrey Burrows and research assistant Miss Lingard, assisting Gervase with the family history; newly added lawyer Oswald Forbes notes that “my firm, Forbes, Ogilvie and Spence, have acted for the…family for well over a hundred years.”

   Local law is here represented by Major Riddle, the Chief Constable of Westshire County, whose investigation—with old friend Poirot—puts to shame the cursory one by Reeves, a virtual walk-on. Christie eliminates much of the humor inherent in the collective surprise over the host’s failure to appear for dinner, but compensates with his wife, Vanda, a self-professed reincarnation of Egyptian queen Hatshepsut and “a Priestess in Atlantis,” who claims to see Gervase’s spirit in the study. Forbes explains that although he disapproved of his sister’s marriage, his proposed new will stipulated that Ruth marry Hugo, not Bury, whose ill-advised investment was in the Paragon Synthetic Rubber Substitute Company.

   It is Lingard whom Poirot espies picking something up, which she identifies as a pencil that Bury had made out of a bullet fired at him in the South African War, and murdered Gervase with Ruth—secretly wed to Lake three weeks earlier—as a motive. Bury reveals that unknown to her, she was no distant cousin, but the illegitimate daughter of Gervase’s brother and a typist, who’d “renounced all rights” after he died in the Great War. Poirot’s apparent accusation of Ruth has the desired effect and Lingard confesses, confirming the truth privately to Poirot: she was the typist, who wanted to protect Ruth’s happiness by preventing the new will, and burst a blown-up paper bag to simulate the sound of a shot.

         — Copyright © 2024 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Remembered Death

      Editions cited —

“The Second Gong” in Witness for the Prosecution: Dell (1979)
“Dead Man’s Mirror” in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories: William Morrow (2013)