Note: Part two of this three-part review can be found here.

FRANK GRUBER “Death on Eagle’s Crag.” Oliver Quade #8. First published in Black Mask, December 1937. There is a tremendous contrast between the mild-mannered encyclopedia salesman Oliver Quade, and the extreme amount of violence that occurs as escaped convicts take over a secluded resort. (4)

RICHARD SALE “A Nose for News.” Daffy Dill #2. First published in Detective Fiction Weekly, December 1, 1934. Unlikely circumstances cause Daffy Dill to be fired from his newspaper job, and he becomes involved in a kidnapping plot while hunting up a story to regain it. Did not seem too believable even while reading it. (2)

LESTER DENT “Angelfish.” Oscar Sail #2. First published in Black Mask, December 1936. Private eye Oscar Sail is hired to steal aerial photos of oil fields and risks his life in a hurricane to save a girl. Vivid picture of the storm’s violence at sea saves the story. (3)

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Bird in the Hand.” Lester Leith #33. First published in Detective Fiction Weekly, April 5, 1932. Lester Leith manages to steal stolen jewels under the watchful eyes of the police. Quite entertaining and amusing except for weak beginning. Gardner’s style is very noticeable; less emphasis on violence. (3)

RAOUL WHITFIELD “China Man.” Jo Gar #18. Published under the name Ramon Decolta in Black Mask, March 1932. Reprinted in The Hardboiled Dicks, edited by Ron Goulart (Sherbourne Press, 1965). Collected in West of Guam: The Complete Cases of Jo Gar (Altus Press, 2013).

   Jo Gar is attacked in his office by someone who appears to be a Chinese coolie, but strangely enough the knife thrower misses his mark, even at close range. Gar tries to follow him, but loses him in the crowds in the streets of Manila under the stress of an approaching hurricane.

   Returning to his small cramped office, he finds a note from his client slipped under the door. The man, an importer of valuable jade, had come early and left. The note accuses a “China man” as the person who has been stealing from him.

   Then his client turns up murdered, knifed to death, and his body dumped into a river.

   This may sound like a complicated case, but in spite of what also seems like a story with a lot of action, neither is true. What makes the story work as well as it does is the setting, that of what had to have been a really exotic, foreign land to most readers of Black Mask in 1932, the streets and other sights of the Philippines. And to tell you the truth, it probably still is to most people living in the US today.

Note: I first wrote a review of this story in 1967, and I posted it on this blog a few weeks ago. Follow the link and you can read it here.

WINSTON GRAHAM – Tremor. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1995. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1996.

   
   One of those hotels is the Hotel Saada where on the 29th of February, the third day of Ramadan, twenty seconds of terror change everything for a disparate group of tourists: Matthew Morris fleeing a failed marriage and failing career; Nadine Deschamps, a beautiful young actress seeking solitude among people well aware of her fame; Jack Frazier, on the run from the police and the partners he betrayed and the suitcase he never lets out of his sight for long; an American lawyer, and three French prostitutes who have saved up enough money to escape their profession and have a little fun on their own terms.

   Graham is less interested in the event itself than how these individuals are changed by their brush with death, the twisted paths that brief twenty seconds of terror leads them down, a chance for some for rebirth and for others for destruction. He certainly writes of the terrors following the earthquake, but it is how they change the people involved and not the terrors themselves that interest Graham.

   While this book has no tie to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, if you are familiar with the Flitcraft Story from that novel and its thematic role there, you have a partial idea where Graham is going.

   Though Graham’s reputation was built on such suspense classics as Take My Life, Night without Stars, Fortune Is a Woman, The Walking Stick, and of course Marnie, the basis for the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name, he was always as much novelist as suspense writer, interested in more than just crime and what leads to it. Notably each of those titles above was the basis for a major film by people like Alfred Htichcock, Sidney Gilliatt, and Ronald Neame.

   Marnie was also adapted as an opera.

   In addition to his suspense novels and thrillers in the Graham Greene mode, he achieved even greater fame and success with his historical novels, beginning with Grove of Eagles, and then the popular Cornish series following the exploits of Ross Poldark and his family. The eleven books in what became the Poldark Saga achieved even greater success than the Alfred Hitchcock movie both here (and in twenty-two countries) on Masterpiece Theater, so much so that the entire saga was remade and filmed a second time.

      Today the popularity of the Poldark Saga has surpassed his suspense novels with only Marnie available in e-book form, while all of the Poldark series is available and pretty much been in print since the first series.

   The qualities of a Graham novel well beyond the build up of suspense are the well drawn characters, the character driven plots, the often real human emotions of his characters trapped not only by events but by their own flaws (as often as not small and insignificant until a crisis), and his refusal to deal in easy and simple happy endings.

   Life in a Graham novel is messy, and neither love nor truth is quite enough to overcome the guilt and disappointments that lead people into dangerous moments. The mere resolution of the plot is seldom enough to satisfy Graham‘s people. There are loose ends, real world pain to be dealt with, guilt that must be lived with, and hard truths that are to bitter to bear.

   A man with night blindness is hunted through the dark by spies, a woman must save her husband from the gallows by proving he didn’t murder his mistress, a sheltered young woman with a lame leg is drawn into a criminal plot, a con woman and thief must confront her past to escape prison, an insurance investigator contemplates allowing a beautiful murderess get away with it, the mistress of a dangerous sports promoter plots his murder with one of his fighters … these are Graham plots.

   He isn’t as important a writer as Graham Greene, but it is to Graham Greene he is most often compared.

   Tremor came late in his career, but shows no loss of his skills. He had in fact written two of his better suspense novels, Cameo and The Green Flash, just before Tremor.

   I admit Graham isn’t to every taste. His books are more novelistic than suspense driven, his protagonists not always likable people, their dilemmas often as not self made through some flaw in their character. Survival and not victory is often the only goal the hero of a Graham novel can hope for, and even that comes at a cost, but their intelligence and humanity make them more than worth the effort to seek out and read..

HOLBY/BLUE “Episode One.” BBC, 08 May 2007. Cal Macaninch as DI John Keenan, Richard Harrington as DS Luke French, Elaine Glover as PC Lucy Slater, and large recurring ensemble cast. Created by Tony Jordan as a spin-off from the established TV medical drama Holby City; also screenwriter. Director: Martin Hutchings. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

   This BBC series might be categorized as police procedural/soap opera drama. It takes place in a small overworked police station in the fictional town of Holby, somewhere in England. This, the first episode of the first of two seasons opens with the well-worn concept of a new copper arriving (DS Luke French) and being introduced (and learning to adjust to) his new partner (DI John Keenan). At the same time, it is also the first day that a crop of new recruits are on the job, including a PC Lucy Slater, a young eager-to-go but klutzy blonde.

   It’s a day like all others, or is it, the new guy wonders. A known pedophile is about to be released for lack of evidence; a husband with a compulsive disorder is convinced that his wife is cheating on him; and Keenan – a maverick who hates playing my the rules — smashes the tail light of the car of the new male friend of his soon to be ex-wife. French bears up to all this with calmness and remarkable composure; and Lucy Slater is able to redeem herself in the eyes of her colleagues.

   It’s done well and at the same time completely by the book. Very slick, in other words. I probably won’t watch another, but then again, I might.  On the other hand, I never watched but one episode of Hill Street Blues either.
   

THE ROVER. United Artists, 1967. Released first in Italy as L’avventuriero. Anthony Quinn, Rosanna Schiaffino, Rita Hayworth, Richard Johnson, Ivo Garrani, Luciano Rossi, Anthony Dawson. Based on the novel by Joseph Conrad. Director: Terence Young.

   It was with some bemusement I watched The Rover, a film based on Joseph Conrad’s novel, a cheap-jack multinational production/tax write-off which captures nothing at all of Conrad’s ethos and even less of the brooding excitement of his writing at its best.

   What we’re left with is Anthony Quinn — that charismatic actor whose career had more bad steps than a derelict lighthouse — as a Napoleonic-era trench privateer returned to his country with all too little to show his head-hunting bosses. He falls in love with a mysterious young woman, tries to refit a derelict ship and slip past a British blockade, but by that time, everyone’s pretty much lost interest in this shabby show.

   How tacky is it? Well, aside from the perfunctory photography and poor dubbing, it’s set in a rather sparsely-populated France (well, maybe everyone was off fighting the wars) with few buildings, one or two streets, and maybe four horses. And the scene of a British ship chasing the privateer was very obviously filmed with One ship photographed from different angles, edited to try and make it look like Two — which don’t work.

   Sad to see talents that once showed some promise stuck in this movie-mire: The Rover was directed by Terence Young, who made movie history a few years earlier launching the James Bond series; aside from Quinn, it features Rita Hayworth and Richard Johnson (who at various times embodied Bulldog Drummond and Lord Nelson) and, in a teeny-tiny part, tucked off in a corner somewhere, movie-goers with long memories will spot Anthony Dawson and wonder what became of the promising actor so memorable as the unlucky Cpt. Lesgate in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder.

CAROLYN WELLS – The Wooden Indian. Fleming Stone #41. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, US, 1935.

   While obviously a mystery novel, maybe even a work of detective fiction, The Wooden Indian is very nearly a fantasy, simply because its resemblance to reality is so razor slim.

   At least, I *think* it’s slim. It takes place in the Connecticut of the 1930s (New London County), and the country club set is very much a part of it. It’s not a world which I was ever a part of, then or now, and maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I just don’t recognize how close to reality it really is (or was).

   At any rate, David and Camilla Corbin are valued members of the Pequot Club, but they are not very happily married. He is wealthy, a stamp collector, and an amateur historian specializing in local Indian legends. She is serenely beautiful, subject to scathing comments from her husband, and every other unattached male in the neighborhood is attracted to her like moths to a flame.

   Wait. There’s more. Legend has it that a curse is upon the Corbin family, and every 100 years one of them will die at the hands of the spirit of a vengeful Indian chief, with bow and arrow. This is the year — and this the stuff of which detective stories are made. It’s no wonder that a friend of Fleming Stone, noted criminologist, calls him in, even before the first murder occurs. As stated on pp.26-27: “Bob’s wire didn’t promise a case exactly, but it held out interesting hopes …”

   In other words, what we are playing here is a game. The rules are fixed. The victim has no say in the matter, even though his identity is known 80 pages in advance. [WARNING: Major Plot Alerts in the Paragraphs ahead.] There is a ghost at hand, there is even what is described on p.191 as a “locked room”, even though the murder took place 80 pages before that and this is the first (and last) time it’s mentioned.

   The solution, by the way, describes (in some detail) the trick the killer used to get in, and yet the only thing blocking the doorway was the red cord used by the dead man to signal that he was listening to the radio and did not want to be disturbed. When Stone came upon the scene earlier, he “lifted one end of the red cord from its hook and went in,” (p.109)

   While the book is listed in Bob Adey’s book on Locked Room mysteries, I must have missed something.

   The killer is not the secretary, as Fleming Stone first surmises. (Apparently the last mystery Stone has read was The Leavenworth Case, and evidently, in that one the secretary *was* the killer.) Instead it’s a trivial variation on the “person most likely” — in other words, a person so obvious that I thought that that was the gimmick. Sorry. No such luck.

NOTE: Obviously forgetting I first read this book back in 1991, as above, I read and reviewed it again on this blog here in 2009. These comments followed Bill Pronzini’s take on it here,  a 1001 Midnights review.

STUART KAMINSKY – Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. Toby Peters #2. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1977. Penguin, paperback, 1979.

   This is the second in Stuart Kam1nsky’s historical series starring his 1940’s Hollywood private investigator, Toby Peters (a.k.a. Tobias Leo Pevsner), who made his own debut last year in Bullet for a Star.  This second entry is  far superior to the first. Once again, Hollywood stars join the fun in both major and minor roles.

   In this vehicle Toby is summoned from the Warner Brothers lot (where he helped Errol Flynn in Bullet) to M.G.M by an urgent call from Judy Garland, who has just discovered the body of a murdered Munchkin on the still-standing publicity set of Munchkin City from The Wizard of Oz, released more than a year earlier. Peters is hired by Louis B. Mayer himself to keep the investigation quiet and protect Judy, whose own safety seems at stake.  Toby’s interview with the “little” suspect arrested in connection with the murder convinces him of his innocence.

   Peters, of course, whose wife has already walked out on him and who shares office space with a dentist, is a progeny of the classic Hammett/Chandler tradition:

   
   And again:

   
   Indeed, Raymond Chandler also has a bit part as himself in the novel. He spots Toby while doing research on flophouses and decides to shadow him, but is waylaid for his efforts. Since Toby is the first real detective he has ever met, our investigator lets him tag along on the case so he can drink in some local color and dialogue first hand.

   A second fatal stabbing, a defenestration., and two attempts on Toby’s life all ensue before the climax, in which even Judy has a hand (or an elbow, to be more exact).

   Murder on the Yellow Brick Road is a well-paced and very neat yarn, indeed, even if it doesn’t require a wizard to spot the culprit. The dialogue is crisp and lively, especially between Toby and his antagonistic brother, LAPD Lieutenant Philip Pevsner, whose boiling point is nil whenever he runs up against his younger  brother.

   Add Clark Gable in a minor role as a prospective witness and several other M.G.M. stars in walk-through parts and it all adds up to quite a pleasant stroll down memory lane as well. Unfortunately, there was a very careless printing job by St. Martin’s Press on the first edition which will hopefully be corrected in subsequent printings, including that  scheduled for the Mystery Guild.

   Kaminsky’s third work is already in progress and will involve Toby Peters with the Marx Brothers.

TWO WAY STRETCH British Lion Films, UK, 1960. Peter Sellers, David Lodge, Bernard Cribbins, Wilfrid Hyde White, Maurice Denham, Lionel Jeffries, Irene Handl, Liz Fraser. Director: Robert Day.

   I don’t often review comedies on this blog – though I do love ’em – but I’m making an exception for this as it is both old and involves a crime. It’s basically Porridge fifteen years earlier, with Peter Sellers as crafty, cockney career criminal (and guest of Her Majesty’s) ‘Dodger’ Lane. He and his cell-mates ‘Jelly’ Knight (David Lodge) and Lenny the Dip (Bernard Cribbins) treat the prison like a hotel, with a newspaper and fry-up every morning.

   The staff, meanwhile, are gullible and good-natured, with the governor (Maurice Denham) more interested in growing prize-winning vegetable marrows than keeping his convicts under control. Unsurprisingly, with such an easy life, Dodger and co have no wish to escape.

   This, however, is just what their old conspirator ‘Soapy’ Stevens (Wilfred Hyde-White) asks them to do. Disguised as a gentlemanly prison chaplain, he recognises that the trio’s imprisonment affords them the perfect alibi and enlists their help in a diamond heist. All they have to do is break out of prison, carry out the theft and break back in again.

   With the prison’s security almost non-existent, the plan is bound to succeed. However, a problem arrives in the shape of Dodger’s old nemesis, the irascible and sadistic prison warder ‘Sour’ Crout (Lionel Jeffries). With this guy around, there’s no way our trio can figure out a way to escape … surely?

   Caper comedies were popular at this time with The Big Job (1965), Too Many Crooks (1959) and Make Mine Mink (1960) showing that we Brits may be rubbish criminals but do make pretty good comedies. This was one of the most popular British films on the year of release, and it’s easy to see why. Schoolboys, in particular, must have loved the silly fun found here, and Jeffries makes for a terrific pantomime villain as the gestapo-like Crout, screaming his lines (“Silence when you’re talking to me!”) and sadistically determined to make every inmate suffer. There’s excellent support too from Liz Fraser and Irene Handl, the latter urging her son Lenny to escape jail like everyone else in their family.

   The break-out attempts in the middle of the film tip the hat to both The Wooden Horse (1950) and Danger Within (1959), spoofing another popular genre of the time, though both are episodic and unsurprisingly focus more on comedy than logistical analysis. The eventual theft of the diamonds from an army vehicle is a little underwhelming, however, though Thorley Walters shows how he could have played Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army (a role in which he was considered).

   This was probably the most casual performance Sellers ever gave, lacking as it does the multi-character revue of The Mouse That Roared (1959), Dr Strangelove (1964) and Soft Beds, Hard Battles (1974) or the intensity of I’m Alright, Jack (1959) and Being There (1979). It is also one of his most charming and accessible films, proving that not only Ealing could do Ealing.

   Fans should also check out The Wrong Arm of the Law (1962) (another Sellers caper and something of a spiritual successor to this), POW spoof Very Important Person (1961) and, more recently, the starry but sadly neglected prison comedy Lucky Break (2001).

Rating: ****

MICHAEL BISHOP “Allegra’s Hand.” Novelette. First appeared in Asimov’s SF, June 1996. Collected in At the City Limits of Fate (Edgewood Press, hardcover, 1996).

   I called this a science fiction story, and it is that, but it’s far from a space or planets story. A young girl new to her school catches the head counselor there, as well as a host of bullies. It’s not difficult to see why. She wears a glove on her left hand, a long-sleeved one that goes up her arm to almost her elbow.

   Why? What is she hiding? Why won’t she tell anyone? She is clearly intelligent, perhaps more than her years. But taunted one day too far, she punches the boy bullying her in the stomach with the hand in the glove, leaving a huge circular bruise. I won’t tell you her secret, as the mystery is a major factor in the first half of the story, one her counselor (female, and a first person narrator) works to unravel.

   Which she eventually does, gaining Allegra’s trust at last, slowly and carefully. It is quite an affliction, shall we say, that Allegra has to face. Luckily she has her father on her side, and she doesn’t have to face her future alone, not for a while yet.

   It’s in essence a quiet, melancholy story and I think a memorable one. But as Mrs. Hewit tells a colleague, “Beth, I go bump against more hopeless, intractable cases than Allegra’s almost very week. None more unusual, I grant that, but many sadder and a few even harder to envision tuning out acceptably.”

   As for me, I agree. It won’t be easy, but I think Allegra is a survivor.

   Michael Bishop has been writing SF since 1970, and his work has won or has been nominated for any number of awards. Even so, his stories are not flashy, and I don’t believe they’ve ever gained the attention they should have.

BLACK EYE. Warners, 1974. Fred Williamson (PI Shep Stone), Marie Cheatham, Rosemary Forsyth, Teresa Graves, Floy Dean, Richard Anderson, Richard X. Slattery, Bret Morrison. Based on the novel Murder on the Wild Side (Gold Medal, paperback original, 1972). Director Jack Arnold. Available for rental at Vudu/Fandango.

   The nicest thing you can say about Black Eye is that it will probably do no lasting harm to Jack Arnold’s reputation. In his hey-day, Arnold directed solid-if-minor classics like Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Tarantula, and The Tattered Dress. He directed Orson Welles in Man in the Shadow and some sources credit him with parts of Touch of Evil. Sad to see him, twenty years after, wasting his time and ours on a lackluster “blaxploitation” pie like this.

   Not that Black Eye is terrible — it’s just not very interesting. In fact, it has some pretty good credentials: based on a Gold Medal Original by Jeff Jacks; starring ethnic auteur Fred Williamson, with help from Teresa (Get Christie Love) Graves as his sexually ambivalent girlfriend and Brett Morrison (Radio’s The Shadow) as a sleazy suspect.

   There are one or two passable fight scenes, and a car chase of flickering interest, but by and large this story of… of … what’s it about? … oh yeah, something about drug dealers and a fancy cane stolen from a dead movie star. Well, it leaves one wondering why they bothered.