LEIGH BRACKETT – No Good from a Corpse.  Coward McCann, hardcover, 1944. Title story of No Good from a Corpse (Dennis McMillan, hardcover, 1998, along with eight short stories. Handi-Books #32, paperback, date? Collier, paperback, 1964.

   Los Angeles private detective Ed Clive is in love with Laurel: a nightclub singer, cute, sprightly, and equally in love with him. But Laurel can’t be true. They both know it, so Clive keeps things platonic. It’s the only way to keep Laurel interested — kinda like an unneutered Jake and Lady Brett Ashley in Sun Also Rises. But he loves her desperately, nonetheless.

   Laurel’s a lady with a past. A past that includes Clive’s ex-best friend Mick. Mick and Clive grew up together. Mick screwed around with Clive’s girlfriend back when they were 18, and Clive has neither forgiven nor forgotten.

   But when Laurel is found bludgeoned to death with Mick’s walking stick, Clive is the only one who thinks it’s a set-up. Clive’s the only guy between Mick and the gas chamber.

   Clive starts out the story with pretty good wits and one-liners. Asked why he’s not wearing his laurels, he says he’s afraid they’d sprout in the rain. When he tells a rival to leave Laurel be, the rival says “I’ve always wondered what God looked like.” “Now you know,” Clive retorts.

   But once he loses his love, darkness cuts a swath across his world. Places “smelled of many people, many things, none of them clean.” A woman’s “face slid away from under popped brown eyes as though it was too tired to stay put.” “[T]he blacked out neons … gave an eerie feeling of desolation, as though Clive was the last man walking on a dead world.” At the screaming pleading pleas of “‘Oh God. Oh God’ …. Clive doubted whether God was worried much.”

   While Clive solves what turns out to be a crime of Byzantine complications, and saves Mick from death, he ends the book with the downbeat thought that “of all things, never to have been born is best.”

   It’s an excellent Chandleresque detective novel — apparently excellent enough to convince Howard Hawks that Leigh Brackett ought to partner equally with William Faulkner in drafting the Big Sleep screenplay.

   I’m a big fan of standalones. They give the author the freedom to put their characters thru the ringer; to destroy them or resolve their conflicts; to leave nothing left. A standalone leaves the reader always wondering, unsure of the ground on which they stand. There’s not the relative safety of a recurring series character (a la James Bond) who you know will come out of the thing relatively unscathed. Private detective standalones are fairly rare.

   This is a good one.

VICE SQUAD. United  Artists, 1953. Edward G. Robinson, Paulette Goddard, Porter Hall, Adam Williams, Jay Adler, Joan Vohs, and Lee Van Cleef. Screenplay by Lawrence Roman, from the novel Harness Bull, by Leslie T. White. Directed by Arnold Laven.

   A B-movie with a bit of faded star power. Not always exciting, but when it works, it works well.

   Edward G Robinson runs the Detective Bureau of an unnamed agency that looks a lot like LAPD and since the film starts with a cop-killing, he pretty much has his work cut out for him. He takes time to expose a fortune hunter posing as an Italian Count, and listen to an underworld informant (Jay Adler, in a nicely-done bit part) with a tip on a forthcoming bank job, but his primary focus is on the murdered officer — until the killing is tied in with the hold-up.

   Screen-writer Lawrence Roman (whose credits include A Kiss Before Dying) does a fine job of switching focus between the cops and the hoodlums, delineating the characters, bringing out internal conflicts in both camps, and generally pointing up the similarities in their methodical approach — Robinson often seems to have as little regard for the niceties of the law as the bad guys — while the hoods prepare for their caper and the cops prepare to close in on them.

   Arnold Laven was a workhorse director who showed flashes of talent, given a decent script. Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1957) and Rough  Night in Jericho  (1967) offer lively action scenes and moments of real feeling surprising in rough-and-ready movies. Vice Squad doesn’t achieve much emotional intensity, but it builds a certain amount of suspense as it moves along, and really comes alive in a final chase-and-shootout in a rotting warehouse.

   By the way, second-billed Paulette Goddard gets about five minutes of screen time, shot on two sets with the look of being rushed through in a single day — talk about faded star power! But what really bothers me is that this movie is all about unraveling a murder and bank robbery.

   So why did they call it Vice Squad?

ROBERT E. HOWARD, L. SPRAGUE de CAMP & LIN CARTER – Conan. Lancer, paperback, 1967. Cover: Frank Frazetta. Chronologically the first in the series.

   My first exposure to the saga of Conan. I found him as exciting a character as his fans have been saying for years. The writing can be uneven, but Conan in combat is never dull. There were many points of similarity between story plots in this volume; Conan probably had his fill of kiling evil magicians. The quality of the pastiches is generally good – note that the highest rated story is by de Camp and Carter. It is also the shortest, however, which may imply something.    Overall rating: ****

“The Hyborean Age, Part I” – Howard. Originally published in The Fantagraph, Feb, Aug, Oct-Nov 1936. The fictional background for the series, telling of events up to the time of Conan (not rated).

“The Thing in the Crypt” – Carter & de Camp. Fifteen-year-old Conan discovers a sword guarded by one of the undying dead. Skillful blend of horror and swords and sorcery. (5)

“The Tower of the Elephant” – Howard. Originally published in Weird Tales, March 1933. Conan undertakes the theft of a well-guarded jewel in an evil priest’s tower and frees the captive alien from whom the priest received his powers. (4)

“The Hall of the Dead” – Howard & de Camp. Originally published in F&SF, February 1967. Conan and Nestor risk the unknown dangers of the ruined city of Larsha for the treasures rumored there, but their net gain is two gold coins. Nothing terribly remarkable this time. (3)

“The God in the Bowl” – Howard. Originally published in Space SF, September 1952. A museum owner is killed under strange circumstances, and Conan is accused, A bit slow at times, but it is made up for as Conan escapes and discovers the real murderer. (4)

“Rogues in the House” – Howard. Originally published in Weird Tales, January 1934. In return for help in escaping imprisonment, Conan helps a nobleman against an evil priest, then saves them both from an ape-man who has taken over the priest’s home. Fun. (4)

“The Hand of Nergal” – Howard & Carter. Conan, the sole survivor of a battle against Yaralet, is brought secretly to that city to destroy its ruler, who possesses a talisman giving him magical powers. The weakest story; Conan needs the counter-talisman to succeed. (3)

“The City of Skulls” – Carter & de Camp. Conan is captured and made a galley slave. When he escapes, a living stone god must be destroyed. Slow in the middle; ending saves story. (4)

WOMEN’S MURDER CLUB “Welcome to the Club” ABC, 12 October 2007 (Season 1, Episode 1). Angie Harmon (Inspector Lindsay Boxer), Laura Harris (Deputy D.A. Jill Bernhardt), Paula Newsome (M.E. Claire Washburn), Aubrey Dollar (reporter Cindy Thomas). Based on the characters in a series of books by James Patterson. Director: Greg Yaitanes.

   This first episode was not the pilot for the series. That was a made-for-TV movie based on the first book in the series, 1st to Die, and which starred Tracy Pollan. (There are now 22 novels and two novellas in Patterson’s series, many of which were co-written by other authors.) The title of this episode is a bit misleading. It is assumed that reporter Cindy Thomas (for the fictional San Francisco Register) will be joining the other three in the “club,” but there is no club per se. In fact when she asks the others if there is a club, there is an immediate chorus of “no”s.

   No matter. A club it is.  Thomas introduced to the others as a fellow reporter to the woman who dies in front of Inspector Lindsay Boxer in dramatic fashion, falling from the top of a building where there are to meet and onto a car. As it turns out, she was also shot to death. The question is, what was the story she was working on, and what was she going to tell Lindsay about it?

   The case is tackled and solved in the usual TV businesslike fashion. Filling the rest of the hour is a lot of subplots involving the various characters’ love lives, including Lindsay’s news that her ex has been promoted over her partner on the force and is now her new boss. The episode ends with the discovery that a serial killer that the women thought had been put away is now back, a vicious psychopath whose M.O. includes sewing the lips of his victims together before leaving them to be found, hence his nickname, the “Kiss-Me-Not” killer. I assume this will form the underlying story arc for the remainder of the season.

   The series ran for just the one season, though, from October 12, 2007, to May 13, 2008. Of the four leading actors, I presume the primary focus was on Angie Harmon, whose striking brunette features make her the obvious choice for the role. Overall then, entertaining in a solid, workmanlike fashion, but without the extra “oomph” that would make the show must watching. (I have not read any of the books.)

RAYMOND POSTGATE – Somebody at the Door. Inspector Holly #1. M. Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1943. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1943. Poisoned Pen Press (British Library Crime Classic), US, trade paperback, 2017.

   It is a dreary day in January 1942 in the middle of the War.

   Grayling finds more reason to grumble before the evening is out, because there are five people aboard who he has little reason to care for, including his Vicar, a German refugee, a young man with a club foot, a corporal from his Home Guard unit, and a man from work. None of them have much reason to like Grayling either, one of them enough to murder him, leaving it up to Inspector Holly to sort out not only how Grayling was murdered, and it is one unique to the books wartime setting, but which, if any of the five men aboard might have done it. Not to mention that inevitable sixth, if unlikely, suspect in any man’s murder, his widow.

   Despite that unique murder weapon, this might sound like just any fairly well written mystery of the Golden Age, but only if the reader doesn’t know who Raymond Postgate was, one of the more interesting and innovative writers of the era who penned only three books, but the first of those a small masterpiece, Verdict of Twelve in which he dissects the twelve jurors on a murder case, one of which is closer to the case than might be good for them. His final book The Ledger is Written came ten years after Someone, and while like Someone is not quite up to the classic status of Verdict is yet another intelligent and quite different take on the genre.

   The chapters are divided up between the suspects with each having his story told, what exactly their grievance with Grayling was and their availability to have murdered him, and Holly’s investigation. Each has a plausible motive and plausible means, and as the canny Holly examines them and weighs them we also get plausibly and engagingly drawn portraits of ordinary people with rather ordinary motives for murder, and of Grayling himself, who like the victims of many of Golden Age mystery thoroughly deserves what he gets.

   A veritable embarrassment of suspects, any one of whom, or someone else, might be the killer, because no one is quite innocent with everything from wartime espionage to adultery in the possible mix.

   The killer though is quite logical, quite reasonable when you get down to it as is the rather bizarre weapon, but it is still a fine ride, thanks to Postgate’s literate hand and sharp eye.

   I’m not sure any mystery writer of the classical or noir form ever put the sheer chance of being thrown in the limelight by fate half as clearly. The murderer was merely someone at the door, and could be anyone, but fate chose a handful of innocents to be thrown beneath the same glaring light as the guilty, and Raymond Postgate makes that almost as suspenseful as revealing which one was not merely a traveller on a train.

   This is available from the British Library Crime Classics collection, and like all books in that series has a fine introduction by Martin Edwards.

HENRY KANE – A Halo for Nobody. Peter Chamber #1. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1947. Dell #231, mapback edition, 1948-49? Also published as Martinis and Murder, Avon #745, paperback, 1956; Avon T-460, paperback, revised edition, date?

   So I’ve been working my way thru James Sandoe’s hardboiled checklist, which I’ve found to be pretty reliable. And this one appears on it with the following faint praise from Sandoe: “Peter Chambers’s first case and the only one in which I could discover any pleasure.”

   NYC private detective Peter Chambers gets hired to find out who murdered the slutty wife of a jewelry store owner.

   Chambers is a pretty likable character, hard drinking and the ladies love him. And he them.

   And as Chambers further digs, it looks like the jewelry store might be an abject lesson in vertical efficiency: Steal the jewels, redesign the settings, and sell them as new.

   Fairly standard detective novel, maybe a par, but spruced up with some of the best hardboiled metaphors and turns of phrase this side of Chandler which may flip that par to a birdie:

   â€œHe had a face like a folded hat.”

   A “blonde with verve and eyes and small curves and a pink revealing gown and voltage.”

   â€œ[W]ith forbidden love and fresh ardor as freely distributed amongst them as cockroach paste in an infested pantry.”

   â€œâ€™[T]he dainty Dorothy can furnish an alibi. She was in bed.’ ‘The dainty Dorothy was in bed,’ Archie mimicked. ‘That’s a fine alibi. It’s a fine alibi for a bedbug. How would you know? Were you there?’ ‘Uh-huh.’”

   â€œShe looked at me and blood went to my head and got crowded like Belmont raceway on a sunny Saturday afternoon.”

   â€œ[She] came up with a laughable little .22, a small black instrument with a tiny muzzle, and I didn’t laugh because the trigger was being squeezed with determination and five cute little pellets entered into me, in the region of the stomach, like five baby fingers into porridge.”

   â€œI pulled at the triggers of both pistols and pumped and I saw blood burst from his head and I watched part of his face dissolve into squirming crimson and I saw him go slowly down behind the desk, like a marionette Santa Claus down a chimney, and I kept pulling at triggers long after there was no sound in the room except the futile foolish click-click of hammers on empty shells….”

 TOP GUN. Fame Pictures/United Artists, 1955. Sterling Hayden, William Bishop, Karen Booth, James Millican, Regis Toomey, Hugh Sanders, John Dehner, Rod Taylor. Story & co-screenwriter: Steve Fisher. Director: Ray Nazarro.

   Terror in a Texas Town (reviewed here) was followed on TCM by Top Gun, also with Sterling Hayden, and  directed by Ray Nazarro, a Universal work-horse who at least knew how to put a picture together. The script, by Steve   Fisher, echoes High Noon and presages Man of the West in its story of Hayden as a local badman who’s been stringing with a Quantrill type (played hy John Dehner as a crafty maniac, in precisely the same style Lee J. Cobb used for Doc Tobin in Man of the West) but rides ahead to warn the folks in his home town that the baddies are coming.

   In High Noon style, the townsfolk spend most of the film debating over what to do, ostracizing Hayden and trotting out their buried grudges rather than mounting an effective defense, till Hayden and a few others have to take care of things.

   Somehow this movie really works.

   Nazarro races through the talky scenes like he knows he’s gotta keep the popcorn crowd in their seats, and makes the most of the few action bits. Although the budget is not much higher than any TV Western of its time, and the plot and dialogue are hardly memorable — barely noticeable, in fact — it’s handled with a workmanlike precision that kept me well-entertained for the brief hour of its length.

MICHAEL AVALLONE – Dead Game. Ed Noon #3. Henry Holt & Co., hardcover, 1954. Permabook M-3012, paperback, August 1955; James Meese cover art.

   This one starts quietly enough. Manhattan-based PI Ed Noon is hired by a woman to follow her husband, an antiques dealer by profession, whom she suspects is cheating on her. But where does he go? To a baseball game. The Polo Grounds, as a matter of fact, the home of the New York Giants before they absconded off to San Francisco. They’re playing a pre-season exhibition game with a makeshift (semi-pro?) team called the Providence Ravens.

   Where Mr. Arongio (Noon’s prey) has eyes only on that other team’s third baseman. If ever one guy could wish another guy dead just staring at him, that first guy would be Mr. Arongio. And guess what? Before the game is over, while it’s still being played, the other guy, the third baseman, is in fact dead, face down on the ground. And the first guy to reach him? No guesses. Mr. Arongio.

   The baseball setting may or may not be unique in the annals of PI fiction, but the action simply does not let up from this point on. Suspects include Mrs. Arongio (who is a looker), Mr. Arongio and his girl friend (Mrs. Arongio was right, and she’s another looker), and several other members of the Ravens. (The dead man was no pal of the rest of the team.) And somewhere along the way a diary supposedly having belonged to Edgar Allan Poe comes into play, along with a missing $20,000 that Mr. Arongio paid for it.

   It is easy to picture Ed Noon, who tells his own story, to have been played the movies by none other than Mike Avallone himself, just as Mickey Spillane once took the leading role in one the Mike Hammer movies. And in a way Dead Game reads somewhat like a Hammer novel, but without the higher intensity and crudeness, and the prose a tad more polished. A more family-friendly sort of PI, you might say. Noon is simply a nice guy who’s playing a slightly dirty – but definitely dangerous – game.

   Those of us who knew Mike Avallone in real life will find a lot to like in this one. Even though Ed Noon is just another member of a long list of now-forgotten PI’s who began their careers in the the 1950s, I’d like to think others might too.

J. JEFFERSON FARJEON – Seven Dead. Inspector Kendall #3. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1939. Bobbs-Merrill, US, hardcover, 1939. Poisoned Pen Press / British Library Crime Classics, US, trade paperback, 2018.

   When journalist and yachtsman Thomas Hazeldean who has come ashore to post a letter spots Ted Lyte fleeing from a house on a remote part of the coast he and a constable catch him with silverware in his pockets, but Lyte is uncommunicative.

   Something has scared the wits out of him.

   They take him to police headquarters where Detective Inspector Kendall is on duty. A few inquiries prove that Haven House where the Fenners live has been mysteriously quiet for some time and no calls have gone through though several have been made. Kendall resolves to find out why and with two constables, a police doctor, and Hazeldean in tow goes to investigate.

   Here there is a nice bit of a jump scare involving the “howler,” an intrusive device the phone service has to notify customers a call is being made to them.

   What they find is six men and a woman in man’s clothes (“She might have been attractive once. She was not now.”), all roughly dressed, all obviously worse for wear, and all dead.

   The doctor can’t say from what, though they have been dead too long to have been Ted Lyte’s work. Mysteries abound, including a painting of a young girl with a bullet hole in it, a gun fired one time, a dirty cricket bat on the mantle where a clock had stood, a dead cat outside, rubber tubing, a mysterious underground work shop that smells strange, and a note with an odd address that says the Suicide Club on the other side.

   Hazeldean makes for an attractive and believable co-sleuth who actually contributes to Kendall’s job as the two, apart and together, pursue answers to what happened. Why would seven strangers come to an empty house, the owners are away, and kill themselves, if it was suicide? Who are they, how did they come, and what is the meaning of their dirty worn clothing, the men are dressed like sailors, and emaciated looks. What ordeal did they face before killing themselves or being murdered?

   Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, who also wrote as Anthony Swift, was a popular writer from a distinguished family who penned several books with Kendall as sleuth and even more about Ben the Tramp, a charming hobo who sometimes assists Scotland Yard. His books were admired by Dorothy L. Sayers, and it isn’t hard to see why. His characters are and smart and attractive, his plots move swiftly, his murders are less contrived and more natural than they first seem, his criminals kill for believable motives, and even when he throws in a romance (as he does here) it is between attractive and likable people the readers cares about.

   In an era where bright young things could be an absolute pain to deal with in an otherwise good mystery novel Farjeon manages to keep them attractive and this side of believable. Hazeldean becomes fascinated by the girl whose picture has a bullet hole (who proves to be Dora Fenner, the now grown daughter of the owner, shades of Laura) in it, and follows a clue across the Channel to Boulogne where more mystery awaits.

   Seven Dead gives us a classic Golden Age puzzle, good dialogue and by play between Hazeldean and Kendall, the latter smart without being unlikely (as Hazeldean says, “…he didn’t play the violin or have a wooden leg or something…,” and only a shade acerbic in an attractive way, and more importantly a reasonable solution that ends in a nice bit of melodrama that nevertheless develops from the plot and characters and doesn’t strain credibility.

   It doesn’t hurt that Farjeon isn’t afraid to throw in thriller and adventure elements and blend them with the puzzle (he wrote several good chase novels too, including one filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, Number 17), meaning his books often seem less dated and formal than many of the greater lights of the genre. I suppose for some that is a drawback, but for this reader it is a definite plus.

   The British Library Crime Classics version of this has a fine introduction by Martin Edwards and an attractive cover and is available reasonably. All the Ben the Tramp books are available currently and several of Farjeon’s others, and all the ones I’ve read have been entertaining, though not necessarily classics.

   He’s not another Christie or Sayers, but he is great fun to read which isn’t always true of writers from his era. His books are old fashioned enough to fill that bill while written in a straight forward modern enough style not to leave the reader gritting his teeth, for a solid fast entertaining mystery novel of the era you could do a lot worse than Farjeon.

RICHARD S. PRATHER & STEPHEN MARLOWE – Double In Trouble. Shell Scott #19 & Chester Drum #9. Gold Medal #d926, paperback original, 1959.

   Shell Scott, an L.A. private detective, gets a knock on his door in the middle of the night from a beautiful but icy buxom blonde in distress. He is of course in the nude when he answers the door, causing some brief embarrassment.

   Her dad, a famous labor law professor, has been kidnapped by the Teamsters right before he was scheduled to testify in front of a Senate Subcommittee about Teamster racketeering. Please find him, she pleads, before it’s too late!

   The buxom blonde then flies to D.C., where she is nearly kidnapped by a splinter group of Teamsters who are trying to use the Senate investigation as a coup opportunity. She just happens to be the wife of the current head of the Teamsters — a Jimmy Hoffa clone.

   But the highway kidnap is foiled by the serendipitous interference of D.C. private detective Chester Drum, who happens to be out on loan to the Senate Subcommittee investigating the Teamsters!

   Shell Scott messes with the Teamsters on the west coast whilst Chet Drum does ditto on the east.

   Each detective alternates chapters, developing the story from their own unique point of view

   And they clash. Boy do they clash. They hate each other. For the first 245 pages of this 290 pager, they hate each other.

   It’s funny because they are near mirror images of each other, with Drum the shadow side, more restrained and conservative and negative; Scott the irrepressibly exuberant show off. But they’re both very tough and hell with the ladies.

   They hate each other because they’re the same person. They are fiercely independent, they’re cagey about revealing who their client is, and they’ll beat the crap out of you if you don’t cooperate with them. So they beat the crap out of each other each time they meet, allowing the bad guys to escape, allowing their girlfriends (each of whom were picked up by Drum/Scott in prior coordinated chapters) to get abducted.

   It’s a heavyweight and blood soaked keystone cops caper as Drum and Scott each suspect the other is a Teamster thug, and nearly screw up everything before finally becoming pals and partnering up to save the day starting at page 245.

   It’s an enjoyable diversion, with an ending promising more tandem Drum/Scott adventures to come that I believe never came to be….