ZODIAC. “The Cool Aquarian.” Thames Television, UK, 04 March 1974. Anouska Hempel (Esther Jones), Anton Rodgers (David Gradley). Guest Cast: Michael Gambon, Trevor Baxter. Directed by Don Leaver. Currently available on YouTube here.

   The gimmick in this 1970s British mystery TV series, if one be needed, and there always is, is the teaming up of a stolid police inspector with a young lady astrologer, who is also quite pretty. The idea is that she is to use the horoscopes of the possible suspects to gauge their involvement, while he goes by traditional police work.

   The fellow who’s posted this one on YouTube has included five of the six episodes that comprise the entire series, but for some unknown reason the first one, which introduced the characters and the whole setup, is not one of them.

   In this, the second of the series, they’re already well settled in their roles, which a little surprisingly does not include a lot of conflict between them. The case consists of locating an elderly couple’s niece, a young woman who lives with them but who has gone missing. She is a secretary to a high-powered businessman, the kind of fellow who thinks (for example) of burning one of two extremely rare postage stamps he owns so that the remaining one is all that much more valuable. (See the second photo down.)

   It’s mostly a routine affair, one which plays out in a light almost-but-not-quite comedic fashion. In the latter vein, however, is the byplay between Grad (the inspector) and Esther’s new temporary butler Neville (Trevor Baxter) whose nose for what makes people tick comes in very useful. It’s too bad this was his only appearance in the show. (See the photo to the right.)

   The chemistry between the two stars is fine. More than fine. Based on this very small sample of size one, it’s a shame there were only the six episodes.

MARGARET SCHERF – The Elk and the Evidence. Rev. Martin Buell #4. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1952.

   Reverend Martin Buell is an Episcopal rector in Farrington, Montana, but some how or another, he always seems to find himself caught up in yet another murder case, The Elk and the Evidence appearing right in the middle of his crime-solving career. Margaret Scherf, the teller of his adventures, as well as those of her other series characters, Grace Severance (4 books), Emily & Henry Bryce (4 books), Lt. Ryan (2 books), as well as a sizable number of standalones, is known for her light humorous approach to writing detective fiction, and the example at hand is no exception.

   The case is threefold. (1) A package of elk meat given to Buell as a gift unaccountably contains a man’s toe. (2) A hunter who was a member of a large hunting party has gone missing. And (3) a girl coming to Montana to vet out a wealthy man as possible marriage material encounters two men in hunting clothes leaving a third man overnight in a lower train berth while on her way home.

   Are the three incidents connected? You bet they are.

   The humor comes quietly in almost every page of the first half of the book – only a smile perhaps, but most detective novels have none. The smiles don’t come from wacky behavior, but largely from Buell’s observation of people and the natural order of things in a small town in which everybody knows everybody else. The girl, a natural redhead, has to be put up in a widower’s spare bedroom, for example, which causes a lot of curiosity.

   This is a lot of fun to read, as you can imagine, but unfortunately the detective end of things is, to coin a word,  disappointing. Reverend Buell tries, but as as a man of the cloth, nothing more, he has no way to conduct any kind of proper investigation. The conclusion tries to tie all the preceding events together, but where all of the facts relevant to a motive came from, it is hard to say. And why the man’s toe was removed is even harder to explain. I didn’t even try to follow.
   

      The Rev. Martin Buell series –

Always Murder a Friend. Doubleday 1948.
Gilbert’s Last Toothache. Doubleday 1949.
The Curious Custard Pie. Doubleday 1950.
The Elk and the Evidence. Doubleday 1952.
The Cautious Overshoes. Doubleday 1956.
Never Turn Your Back. Doubleday 1959.
The Corpse in the Flannel Nightgown. Doubleday 1965.

DARRYLE PURCELL – The Mystery of the Stuntman’s Ghost: A Hollywood Cowboy Detective Mystery. Sean “Curly” Woods #?. Illustrated by Darryle Purcell. Kindle edition only, 2014.

   
   Enter our hero and his buddy, Fox Studios chauffeur Nick Danby ,who together are the Hollywood Cowboy Detectives with sometime help from Western star Hoot Gibson. Curly and Nick find they have their hands full doing things like clearing a drunken Ken Maynard from a murder he was framed for, battling sabotage on the film set, or uncovering German and Japanese fifth columnists the Viper and the Dragon threatening the good old USA.

   Written in a breezy pulp style these books (as far as I know they only exist in e-book form) in novella length adventures (116 pages in the longest one I’ve seen running some four to five chapters) involve the boys with mostly Western stars (though the adventure before this had the boys working on a Warner Oland – Charlie Chan movie set on a dude ranch) as ex-reporter and former stuntman Curly finds himself up and down in the business moving from one studio to another in much the same role of Bill Lennox in W. T. Ballard’s stories (though Lennox stayed at one studio and became a producer) or L. J. Washburn’s Lucas Hallam books.

   The Lennox and Hallam books are serious mysteries and both fun and well written. This is somewhat closer to a less extreme Robert Leslie Bellem – Dan Turner Hollywood Detective or Michael Morgan’s Bill Ryan books.

   That’s not a knock, both those are great fun. In fact they are written to be fun and playful, an appetizer and not a main course.

   Here Curly has only just returned from Arizona on the Chan case where they got a hand from regular Hoot Gibson, Warner Oland, Keye Luke, and another regular Fed, Big Jim Webber battling a Japanese saboteur known as the Dragon when he gets a telegram from stuntwoman Tootsie working for Paramount filming action scenes for Hopalong Cassidy (*) films in the famous Lone Pine location that she needs help.

   As Tootsie and Bill Boyd fill Curly in after he calls on Hoot Gibson on the way to Lone Pine, it turns out the film set is being haunted. Wally Stanhope, a stuntman who died filming Charge of the Light Brigade, is appearing as a ghostly specter on a horse frightening cast and crew and causing budget overruns.

   
   The mystery is at best serviceable, a basic revenge plot based on the first and third books in the series and the detective work about the level of Gene or Roy in a Republic oater (okay screenwriters Eric Taylor and John K. Butler were Black Mask boys and did a bit better there), but somehow that’s appropriate and fits the playful approach of these entertainments. That B movie plotting is part of the fun with these.

   A cross between a hero pulp, comic book, B-movie series, and episodic television, these are written in a straightforward manner with some feeling for the actual making of those great B-features and a nod to the stars who made them. While not on the level of Stuart Kaminsky’s Toby Peters books they are still fun, fast, harmless reads with a nice nostalgic feel for those of us who grew up on those films.

   As a kind of palate cleanser between more serious fare, they are inexpensive fun reads that move almost as fast as the films they are dedicated to, and Purcell’s cartoony illustrations are fun and not intrusive.

(*) I am anal retentive enough to know that despite Purcell’s description Boyd was not wearing black in the early Hoppy films. He wore a dark red shirt, and jeans tucked in his boot, but fans saw it as black in the films and soon that black outfit on a white horse became iconic, but for dedicated Hoppy fans like me, just seeing Boyd in action is another bonus.

   
                           HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

ANNE HOCKING – Poison Is a Bitter Brew. Chief Inspector William Austen #6. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942. Originally published in the UK as Miss Milverton (Geoffrey Bles, hardcover, 1941).

   Two heirs to a fortune and a landed estate die of poison, one after the other. The first is passed off by an elderly friend of the family doctor as food poiscn1ing; the second; handled by his locum, is examined more carefully. The verdict in both: murder.

   Miss Milverton, sixthy-ish proprietor of the estate until her death, is shocked. The final heir, her nephew Charles Temple, was on the scene both times and has an excellent motive, but he doesn’t act like a murderer. Chief Inspector Austen and Sergeant Pendarvis investigate.

   This is a good, old-fashioned between the-wars British mystery. Why would a genteel, well-brougbt-up, upper class Englishman or woman commit murder? Not only for wealth, we find. A good read.

PRIVATE DETECTIVE. Warner Brothers, 1939. Jane Wyman (Myrna “Jinx” Winslow), Dick Foran, Gloria Dickson, Maxie Rosenbloom, John Ridgely, Morgan Conway, John Eldredge. Based on the short story “Invitation to Murder” by Kay Krausse in Pocket Detective Magazine, May 1937. Directed by Noel M. Smith. Available for viewing online at https://archive.org/details/private-detective-1939-

   In my recent review of the 1947 film Exposed, I suggested that private detective Belinda Prentice (played quite capably by Adele Mara) may have been the first female PI to have the leading role in an American movie. Not so, as David Vineyard remarked in the comment he left soon after that post appeared:

   â€œWorth seeing Mara in anything, but I don’t think she’s the first female eye, that would be Jane Wyman as Myrna “Jynx” Winslow in 1939’s Private Detective where she works against her police boyfriend Dick Foran to solve a case.”

   True, true, true. In particular, Jinx works for the Nation-Wide Detective Agency, and the case she’s working on is that of a battle in court between a married couple over custody of their young son. When the husband is found murdered, the stakes immediately go a lot higher, with Jinx still on the case with the fellow she is engaged to marry (Dick Foran) being the police detective assigned to it.

   As it turns out, the boy is the heir to a sizable fortune, and it’s no wonder that there are several suspects for the murder who are worth investigating.

   The pace is quick, Jane Wyman bright, witty and appropriately sassy, and the story largely logical, with a bit of humor as well, the latter provided largely by the lovable lunk du jour Maxie Rosenblum as Foran’s assistant on the force. The story is based on a story from a detective pulp magazine, which is clearly the glue that holds everything together as well as it does, making the film one I can easily recommend. This one’s a good one.

THE PINK JUNGLE. Universal, 1968. James Garner, Eva Renzi, George Kennedy, and Nigel Greene. Screenplay by Charles Williams, based on the novel Snake Water by Alan Williams. Directed by Delbert Mann.

   James Garner plays a two-fisted fashion photographer who can flatten a man with one punch and hit two tossed cans in mid-air, shooting from the hip.

   Let me repeat that: James Garner plays a two-fisted fashion photographer who can flatten a man with one punch and hit two tossed cans in mid-air, shooting from the hip.

   I really should end the review right there, but since this was Charles Williams’ only filmed screenplay, and they do explain (sort of) our hero’s prowess at the end, it really deserves a bit more attention. So here it is.

   For purposes of plot, Garner starts out the movie stuck in a backward South-or-Central American nation doing a photoshoot with super-model Eva Renzi. A convenient helicopter is just as conveniently stolen by lovable bad-guy George Kennedy (fresh from his Supporting Actor Oscar in Cool Hand Luke) who soon gets the couple involved in a search for a lost diamond mine.

   En route to the treasure, the actors and camera crew leave the Universal backlot jungle for the arid vistas of Nevada, but they can’t shake off the hackneyed plot. They encounter another colorful rogue (Nigel Greene) and end up in a rather tame gun battle with a mousey little guy from earlier in the movie who wants all the diamonds for himself. (SPOILER ALERT!) He doesn’t get them. (END OF SPOILER ALERT!) A couple double-crosses later, it all comes to a merciful end.

   Universal ground out a number of B-movies like this in the late 1960s, all seemingly put together with the same formula: A leading man past his prime, a dependable character actor, and an eye-catching actress to play carnal cat-and-mouse with the fading male lead. Stir in a modicum of action, a dollop of whatever passes for romance, and a hint of humor, let it stew among the familiar Universal studio sets and “exteriors” and….

   And it worked quite well in PJ and Coogan’s Bluff. Less so — much less so — in things like The Hell with Heroes, A Lovely Way to Die, Jigsaw, and others too lame to name, by which standard, Pink Jungle is a Wheelchair Case.

   To his credit, Charles Williams does what he can with it, throwing a knowing wink into the dialogue when the clichés pile up, but even he can’t get this one up on its feet. Hell, it’d take divine intervention to pull this cinematic Lazarus from its celluloid tomb, and while I can’t say for sure that angels feared to tread the Universal backlot, they never seemed to show up there in significant numbers.

   I shall add that James Garner manages to grin and look light-hearted through all this, Nigel Greene projects his accustomed authority in too little screen time, and Eva Renzi, memorable in The Quiller Memorandum (or was it Funeral in Berlin? I forget which.) fills her forgettable part more than adequately.

   But it’s all for naught under Daniel Mann’s leaden direction. How they kept his obvious disinterest from spreading to the rest of the cast I can’t figure — perhaps they quarantined him — but The Pink Jungle just isn’t worth that much deep thought.

RUDOLPH FISHER – The Conjure-Man Dies. Dr. John Archer & Sgt. Perry Dark #1 (*). Covici Friede, hardcover, 1932.  Reprinted several times, including:  Arno Press, hardcover, 1971, introduction by Stanley Ellin. University of Michigan Press, softcover, 1992; Poisoned Pen Press, softcover, 2022.

   The first Black detective novel. It is set in Harlem, involving the murder of a soothsayer.

   The author was a doctor who died by cancer aged 37. By proxy, he places a Dr. Archer, who lives across the street from the crime scene. Archer volunteers his scientific services to the aid of Detective Dart of the Harlem precinct. Local politicos made the recent choice to hire Black police officers, as better able to traverse Harlem’s cultural eccentricities.

   An excellent introduction by Stanley Ellin points out the interesting combination here of Van Dine inspired scaffolding, scientific induction and overlong exposition with Hammett-like precision in dialogue.

   What makes the book unique is its presentation of Harlem characters in their colorful vernacular of the times — a vernacular whose stark presentation may be inspired by Hammett but the content of which is entirely its own.

   Enjoyable mystery and worth reading even were it not an important historical document.

(*) The pair of detectives also appeared in the novella “John Archer’s Nose,” which was collected in The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher (University of Missouri, 1987). This may have been its first appearance.

JOHN CREASEY – A Knife for the Toff. Richard Rollinson #24. Evans, UK, hardcover, 1951. Pyramid R-1097, paperback, 1st US edn, 1964.

   Richard Rollinson, the Toff is on the dance floor with the beautiful Camilla aboard a yacht owned by the ruthless and grossly fat Rumplemeyer who watches malevolently over them, and despite the seeming atmosphere of gaiety time is running out for the Toff as he flirts with his beautiful dancing partner.

   That, of course, is the authentic voice of the gentleman adventurer of the Twenties and Thirties however hardened and changed by the War. But the day of the swashbuckling poetry-spouting hero serenading bobbies in the street and speeding down narrow foggy roads in low slung cars is over. Tough guy Americans, Peter Cheyney, and the War ended all that and James Bond is about to put the boot in it for higher stakes than boodle.

   It is 1951, and the breed has changed a bit, grown a shade tougher, and less concerned with the niceties. We are still two years out from James Bond, but at times it is hard not to wonder that the same things that influenced Ian Fleming’s licensed public executioner might not be haunting the Toff as well. He’s not quite the same man he was before the War.

   The Toff was always the odd man out of the gentleman adventurer school. Not only was he genuinely from money and birth (“A gold spoon,” he tells Camilla when she accuses him of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth). Despite that his knight errantry came with a social conscience, it is hard to imagine Simon Templar or Norman Conquest possessing, and however close he skirts it, he is never a desperado or outlaw, just a bit careless with the workings of the law when they interfere with justice.

   Even in those rare cases where the villain he’s pursuing is a personal one (The Toff Goes to Market, in which Aunt Gloria is poisoned by wartime black marketeers), he’s far less likely to fling himself through plate glass windows with guns blazing or dangle the odd bad guy out windows than the Saint or 1066, and unlike Creasey’s other gentleman hero, the Baron, he would never take revenge on a social order that betrayed him.

   It’s hard to imagine the Saint financing a club for boys in the East End like the Toff.

   All that is about to go out the window with this one though. It is 1951, a new decade, and Rollinson is up against a different kind of bad guy than the usual petty master criminals he’s used to, and the fantastic Rumplemeyer has Rolly trapped on his yacht, the Lucretia, with only minutes to choose between a watery grave and serving a hideous criminal master.

   While Creasey always opens well, it is unusual for him to put the Toff in the thick of it on page one and start ratcheting from that point on.

   What Creasey excels at is the choreography of tension and action. His heroes are not the kind to stand around wondering what course to take. That’s another Bondian tie. They aren’t afraid to kick the card table over when they get a bad hand.

   The Toff does escape, with the help of Camilla, who has fallen for him and reformed based on nothing but a kiss (shades of Pussy Galore, and there is more than one parallel here between Fleming and Creasey with a few bits similar to scenes in Diamonds Are Forever and Goldfinger), with both of them escaping on a lifeboat only to end up stranded at sea for ten days while they fall in love.

   Meanwhile back at the farm the Toff’s man Jolly (like Tonto the brains of the outfit despite his comic relief role), his wealthy disapproving titled Aunt Gloria, East End boxer and pub owner Bill Ebbutt, and Rolly’s rival/friend Grice of the Yard believe him dead, which if nothing else gives us a chance to take a tour of the Toff’s trophy wall (the finest such museum outside the Yard’s Black Museum) replete with a top hat with a bullet hole in it, various knives, poisons, coshes, and a hangman’s rope that was used on one of the more unlucky types the Toff battled

   Rollinson and Camilla are rescued, but when the get back to London, before they can even get off the ship, an attempt is made on their lives and Camilla receives a serious head wound thanks to Rumplemeyer’s man in the UK, the Wizard, who the Toff believes is one Colonel Merlin.

   In almost every book the Toff finds himself at odds with the police, even hunted and forced to work alone, or with his unlikely allies in the East End, to defeat the threat at hand, but here it is with a vengeance. Always before the Toff was a justice figure, but the least bloodthirsty of the type.

   Not here. He’s not defending the idea of justice, this time it is personal and he’s ruthless.

   Granted he doesn’t go around popping off the unwashed with the vigor of the Saint or Norman Conquest, but he leaves a few bodies behind before he uncovers Rumplemeyer’s plot to use an illegally acquired submarine to hold up a shipment of gold bullion at sea (shades of Goldfinger and Assault on a Queen), ending with the Toff aboard a Royal Naval destroyer hunting down Rumplemeyer for a savage finish.

   But that isn’t the end, the end is a bittersweet note with a bit of class conscious reality thrown in the mix, and here is where Creasey and Fleming really part ways, because by the last line the old irrepressible Toff is back, a bit heart sore and sadder but wiser. No year long benders getting out of shape and agonizing over his life choices for the Toff.

   It’s not that he’s made of sterner stuff. Only that he is cut from thinner cardboard, and Fleming’s war was much dirtier than Creasey’s.

   This is my favorite among the Toff novels, actually the second one I read at the easily influenced age of fifteen (the first was The Toff in New York), and part of what sold me was a great Jack Thurston cover with a top-hatted Toff in the upper left corner, cigarette holder in hand, while on the cover the Toff and Camilla stand on the deck of something (hard to say what) as fireworks go off on the deck of a surfaced submarine behind them.

   I’m fairly sure that cover would have sold me any book, whether I had ever heard of Creasey or not (and no, that scene isn’t in the book).

   I reread the book for this review with only a shade less enjoyment than when I first read it. While it has many of Creasey’s problems as a writer it also has all of his virtues, which for me outnumber the former, and today has the added cachet of how much it has in common with some of the Bond’s to come and the changing tone of the Post-War British thriller.

   No, I don’t think Fleming read Creasey, though it is possible, but I do think both men were reflecting something new to popular fiction in that time period that came out of the War each in their own way, and to be perfectly fair, the Toff being on that destroyer doesn’t make any more sense than Bond manning a Bofors gun in South Africa at the end of Diamonds are Forever, but I’m grateful to Creasey and Fleming for not caring and doing it anyway. (*)

(*) And I was grateful when Philip McCutchan’s Commander Esmonde Shaw and James Dark’s Mark Hood finished with similar scenes in their adventures. I like my fictional t’s crossed and i’s dotted, whether it makes sense or not.

   
                           BEST WISHES TO ALL!!