EDWARD D. HOCH “The Theft of the Brazen Letters.” Short story. Nick Velvet #4. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1968 (their 300th issue). First collected in The Spy and the Thief (Davis, digest-sized paperback; 1st printing, December 1971).

   The reason I like Hoch’s Nick Velvet series so much is that there’s always a twofold mystery to be solved in them. Nick’s fee is $20,000 per each commissioned theft he agrees to take on, and each time it is always for some insignificant object that no one would ever think worth stealing. Mystery number one: How does he mange to steal that very insignificant object? Mystery number two: Nick is also a very inquisitive guy, and of course he’s always also interested as to why he was asked to steal the item he does.

   For example, from the introduction to this story in EQMM, previous thefts he’s taken as assignments include stealing a tiger from a zoo, water from a swimming pool and a toy mouse from the prop room of a movie studio. In “The Theft of the Brazen Letters,” he asked to steal three of seven neon letters from the outside of a commercial building. The seven letters are SATOMEX. I think you can deduce on your own which three letters Nick’s client wants stolen, but I don’t think you’ll have any more idea than I did as to why.

   As is usual for Ed Hoch’s stories, this is purely a puzzle tale. Nothing more nor anything less, and that’s super fine for me. There’s even a bonus in this one, as Nick has the local cops to contend with, and as a surprise to me, he’s one up on them as well. The zinger at the end is simple, but a zinger nonetheless.

THE FOREIGNER. STX Films, 2017. Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan, Michael McElhatton, Liu Tao, Charlie Murphy, Orla Brady, Katie Leung. Written by David Marconi, based on the 1992 novel The Chinaman by Stephen Leather. Directed by Martin Campbell. Currently streaming on Netflix.

   The Foreigner may not come with instant name recognition, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a well-crafted, solid thriller. Directed by Martin Campbell (Casino Royale), the movie benefits from the presence of two action stars: Pierce Brosnan, who Campbell directed as James Bond in GoldenEye (1995) and Hong Kong-turned-Hollywood martial arts star, Jackie Chan.

   This, however, is not your comedy/action hybrid 1990s Jackie Chan movie. Gone is the humor and the goofy, charming persona that he imbued with ease into nearly every character he portrayed. Here, Chan plays against type as a broken, lonely, and vengeful father determined to avenge the death of his daughter. It’s striking how Chan all but disappears into his character. Moving with a sullen gait and with notable bags under his eyes, Chan’s character – a man who has lost everything and has nothing to lose – is mourning personified.

   Chan portrays Ngoc Minh Quan, a London restaurant owner of Chinese-Vietnamese heritage. A dedicated father, Quan ends up witnessing his daughter die in a bombing perpetrated by a rogue IRA splinter group in London. From then on, his life will never be the same. Not only is his wife gone – she died giving birth to his daughter – but he is also suffering from the ongoing trauma of having lost two young daughters when fleeing the communist takeover of South Vietnam decades ago.

   Quan sets his sights on Liam Hennessy, a Sinn Féin politician now serving as Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. The British have tasked Hennessy with finding out who the rogue IRA operatives in London were. Complicating matters is the fact that Hennessy has an IRA past, one that he swears is behind him. But is it? Quan, for one, certainly doesn’t think so.

   As the movie progresses, the film reveals itself to be driven by two narrative thrusts. One deals with Quan’s single-handed quest for revenge. As it turns out, the beaten down Quan has more than one trick up his sleeve. As a young man in South Vietnam, he had Special Forces training and served with the US Army with distinction. Those skills, while perhaps a little rusty, prove to be very useful to Quan as he takes out many of Hennessy’s men. It’s great to see that Chan has still has many of his martial arts acting chops (pun intended), even though there are moments when he gets a little too John Rambo – think First Blood (1982) – for believability’s sake.

   The other, more interesting, story line concerns Hennessy’s divided loyalties and vulnerability in the tinderbox of Belfast politics. Brosnan shines here as a former terrorist who has supposedly decided to break away from his violent past and advance his cause through the political system instead.

   Trying to please both the British and the young radicals in Catholic nationalist circles proves a heady job, one that seems to have strained his marriage beyond repair. Like any good movie about Northern Irish politics, there are betrayals and plots, schemes and broken dreams. In The Foreigner, it’s Chan’s character who enters this insular world and lights the matches that end up burning it all to the ground.

   Both entertaining and captivating, The Foreigner is one of the better thrillers that I’ve watched recently. It’s nothing I would go out of my way to watch a second time, but it kept me interested enough. One final thought: for whatever reason, I don’t remember any songs from the movie. There is a soundtrack, however and it blends seamlessly with the downbeat, claustrophobic atmosphere of the film.
   

CARROLL JOHN DALY – The Snarl of the Beast. Edward J. Clode, hardcover, 1927. Gregg Press, hardcover, 1981. Perennial, paperback, 1992. Lead story in The Snarl of the Beast: Race Williams, Volume 2 (Altus Press, 2016).

   Carroll John Daly was one of the fathers of the modern hard-boiled private eye, a primary influence on such later writers as Mickey Spillane. His style and plots seem dated today, but the presence of his name on the cover of Black Mask in the Twenties and Thirties could be counted on Lo raise sales of the magazine by fifteen percent.

   Daly’s major contribution was Race Williams, the narrator of Snarl of the Beast and the first fully realized tough-guy detective (his first appearance, in the June 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask, preceded the debut of Hammett’s Continental Op by four months). Williams was a thoroughly hard-boiled individual. As he says of one criminal he dispatches, “He got what was coming to him. If ever a lad needed one good killing, he was the boy.” Williams doesn’t hesitate to dole out two-gun, vigilante justice.

   The Snarl of the Beast has an uncomplicated plot: Williams is asked by the police to help track down a master criminal known as “the Beast” and reputed to be “the most feared, the cunningest and cruelest creature that stalks the city streets at night.” Williams is willing to take on the job and to give the police credit for ridding the city of this menace, just as long as he gets the reward.

   Along the way he meets a masked woman prowler, a “girl of the night,” and of course the Beast himself. Daly is not known for literary niceties — his style can best be described as crude but effective — yet there is a certain fascination in his novels and his vigilante/detective. Characterization is minimal and action is everything. “Race Williams — Private Investigator  — tells the whole story. Right! Let’s go.”

   Race Williams also appears in The Hidden Hand (1929) and Murder from the East (1935), among others. Daly created two other series characters, both of them rough-and-tumble types, although not in the same class with Williams: Vee Brown, hero of Murder Won’t Wait (1933) and Emperor of Evil (1937); and Satan Hall, who stars in The Mystery of the Smoking Gun (1936) and Ready to Burn (1951), the latter title having been published only in England.

     ———
   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.

DOUG SWANSON – House of Corrections. Jack Flippo #5. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 2000. Berkley, paperback, May 2001.

   Fifth in the series and unfortunately the last. Rather than repeat myself, for more about the author and some additional comments about the series and its leading character, you can do a lot worse than to see my review of Dreamboat, number two overall, posted here on this blog nearly fifteen years ago

   Some of which needs repeating, though. Before becoming a mostly unsuccessful PI,  Jack Flippo was an Assistant D.A. in Dallas. His boss back then is now retired but in trouble. He’s in jail, and he needs help. It seems he was driving a car belonging to his wife, was stopped for speeding, and the cops in a dump of town found a “smidgen” of heroin in the car.

   What he needs Jack to do is find his wife, who is off sailing somewhere in Galveston Bay. It sounds easy enough, and Jack owes the guy, and so he says yes, which as it turns out is a bad, bad mistake. Somehow the case is connected with the deaths of two drug dealers in the same small tank town as Luster, and guess what, the wife is proving harder to find than she should be.

   This is one of those books in which nobody, and I mean nobody, is telling the truth, sometimes two or times over. Flippo is also not the brightest bulb in the box, so it takes him a while to figure this out, and even then he always seems one step behind. What the author Doug Swanson is doing here is taking the most irreverent way of telling a PI story, shaking all the usual ingredients around, and seeing what comes out. Down and dirty is only half of it.

   It’s a rip-roaring of an ending, though. I wouldn’t mind seeing a movie made of this one. Maybe Robert Mitchum as Jack Flippo; Lance LeGault as Wesley; Cybill Shepherd as the wife; and Margot Kidder as the intrepid girl reporter anxious to make her mark in the world. It’s quite a mix, and it’s too bad the series ended with this one.

TENSPEED AND BROWN SHOE “The Robin Tucker’s Roseland Roof and Ballroom Murder.” ABC, 03 February 1980 (Season 1, Episode 3). Ben Vereen (E. L. “Tenspeed” Turner), Jeff Goldblum (Lionel Whitney). Guest Cast: Elayne Heilveil, John Pleshette, Leo Gordon. Created & written by Stephen J. Cannell. Director: Arnold Laven. Currently streaming  at the Shout Factory website

   As I recall, whenever I’ve found the series available, whether streaming online or on DVD, the first two episodes, comprising a two-part pilot, has not been included. And so, as a direct consequence, I’ve never been properly introduced to the two main characters in this quite enjoyable comedy slash mystery show – the main question being how these two quite opposite fellows got paired up in the first place. The second question I still have is how they got their nicknames, which are barely mentioned in this one, if at all.

   I could use a helping hand, in other words. And on this blog, that’s what the comments are for.

   Based only on this third episode then, Ben Vereen (Tenspeed) is a fast talking con man who ia apparently out on parole, while Jeff Goldblum (Brown Shoe) is a former accountant who has always dreamed of becoming a PI, and now here he is as one. He’s quite the opposite in personality to his new partner, being uptight and unwilling to be in any way shady in how he operates.

   This one begins with the latter receiving a thousand dollar bill by private courier, along with the halves of two others. He is promised the other two halves if the job he is offered is accomplished correctly: to find a young girl with only a photo and address to go on. As it so happens, she is a very naive dime-a-dance girl at a 1940s era dance hall, apparently with no adjustment for inflation, and the story goes on from there. Quite naturally as in stories such as this, bodies pile up more quickly than we the viewer even know who they are or were. It is equally obvious that more than one party wants to find the girl.

   It’s all done in solid tongue-in-cheek fashion, with full awareness of all the well-established tropes of the PI novel, with dialogue to match. One phrase that I remember was along the lines of “the fat man had more chins than the Hong Kong phone directory.” And the two stars appear to be having a good time with all the fun and games they are asked to play. I don’t know what reaction yours might be, but I had as much fun with this one as the two players seem to have had.

IF SCIENCE FICTION. February 1967. Editor: Frederick Pohl. Cover art: [Paul E.] Wenzel. Overall rating: 3 stars.

LARRY NIVEN “The Soft Weapon.” [Known Space series #14.] Novella. Two humans and a puppeteer have stolen from them a strange weapon from the past. Corresponding to each setting the weapon takes on a new shape and purpose. Much too long [43 pages]; not until the second half does there seem to be any story at all. (2)

   [Collected in Neutron Star (Ballantine, paperback original, 1968), and Playgrounds of the Mind (Tor, 1991).]

BRUCE McALLISTER “Gods of the Dark and Light.” A contrast between religions as settlers invade an isolated planet, and what religions become. (4)

   [Although this story has never been reprinted or collected, Bruce McAllister has written a long list of short fiction, and as of last year was still adding to that list.]

KEITH LAUMER “Forest in the Sky.” [Retief.] Novelette. On a planet where the inhabitants are forced to live in he sky to avoid the ferocity of their children on the ground, Retief again saves the diplomatic staff from the Grocci. Quite funny. (3)

   [First collected in Retief: Ambassador to Space (Doubleday, 1969 / Berkley, 1970.) The long running series of Retief adventures were a big hit back in the day.]

ALGIS BUDRYS “The Iron Thorn.” Serial, part 2 of 4. To be reviewed in its entirety at a later date.

ROBERT RAY “Confession.” A priest in North Australia receives an alien with a message of deep religious significance. Overdone. (2)

   [This was the author’s only published science fiction story.]

RICHARD WILSON “The Evil Ones.” Novelette. A murderer committed to a rest-home redeems himself by aiding aliens to repair their ship and leave Earth. Sentimental at the end, but effective. (4)

   [First collected in The Story Writer and Other Stories (Ramble House, 2011.) Wilson wrote only two novels, but was well known for a long list of short fiction.]

MATHER H. WALKER “The Dangers of Deepspace.” Glamorous space reality isn’t. (3)

   [The second “one shot wonder” in this issue.]

C. C. MacAPP “A Beachhead for Gree.” [Gree series.] Novelette. The battle against the Gree continues, this time on a planet of pacifists. From page 149: “It appears … you are as fanatical as those you fight.” A good point, but the evil of Gree overcomes. (3)

   [Never reprinted or collected. The last of nine stories about the long fought battle against the Gree.]

CHRISTOPHER BUSH – The Case of the Tudor Queen. Ludovc Travers #18. Cassell, UK, hardcover, 1938. Holt, US, hardcover, 1938.  Penguin #849, paperback, 1953. Dean Street Press, trade paperback, 2018. (I believe that Dean Street has reprinted all 63 Travers books in uniform softcover editions.)

   Amateur detective Ludovic Travers and friend Supt. George Wharton of Scotland Yard inadvertently stumble on two dead bodies in the house belonging to one of the dead persons. She is actress Mary Legreye, who recently was applauded as Mary Tudor.

   She and her houseman, Fred Ward, appear to have committed suicide.  Miss Legreye is sitting in a high-backed chair with the furniture cleared away, so that the scene is like one from the play. Both Travers and Wharton are suspicious, and the police surgeon corroborates their view. These are murders. But by whom, and why?

   Miss Legreye is pregnant, the p.m. reveals, but no man can be found who can be named as her paramour. Actors,  manager, and playwright in turn are investigated and found to have alibis. The case is almost given up as hopeless when Travers sees the light. A cast-iron alibi turns out to be faked, very cleverly indeed. When it yields to Travers’ investigation, a cruel, cold-blooded murderer 1s taken.

   Interesting all the way.

PLEASE MURDER ME! Distributors Corporation of America, 1956. Angela Lansbury, Raymond Burr, Dick Foran, John Dehner, Lamont Johnson, Denver Pyle, Russell Thorson. Director: Peter Godfrey. Available for viewing on YouTube.

   As almost all of the user reviews on IMDb point out, this inexpensively made feature attraction could easily have been a dry run for Raymond Burr in being chosen for the leading role in the Perry Mason TV series the following year. A small but significant portion takes place in a courtroom, one which looks a lot like the one on Perry Mason – but then again, don’t all courtrooms in the movies or on TV look alike?

   As well-known lawyer Craig Carlson, Burr plays a defense attorney in this one. Accused of murder is the woman he loves, Angela Lansbury as Myra Leeds. Dead is Carlson’s best friend, Myra’s husband, from whom she was seeking a divorce. She claims she shot him in self-defense, and with a ploy that shocks all of the onlookers in the courtroom, including a gaggle of eager reporters, Carlson makes it stick.

   Then comes the truth, which I won’t reveal (but which I’ll allow you to guess), which is when the movie takes off at double speed, ending in the kind of moment that is only allowed in the movies, but which I found quite engrossing. The fancifulness of it all can easily be overlooked in light of the intensity of Raymond Burr’s character, which is almost but not quite over the top. Angela Lansbury, as a femme fatale, not so very much. In my opinion, of course.

JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE – The Mad and the Bad. ‎ NYRB Classics, paperback, July 2014. Translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Introduction by James Sallis. First published in 1972 as O dingos, O chateaux! Winner of the French Grand Prix of crime fiction for the year 1973.

   A super rich couple dies when their private plane flies into a mountain.

   The husband’s brother, a failed architect, inherits their young bratty son and their fortune.

   The fortune is cool. Who wouldn’t want a fortune?

Now all the architectural plans that nobody liked can finally be built!

   But the brat! What to do with the brat?

   He hatches a brilliant idea!

   He’ll start a foundation as a philanthropist for people with disabilities.

   Hire help, but only conspicuously with impairments: A chef with epilepsy; a valet with one arm; a wounded veteran chauffeur.

   Ahh. And the coup de grace: a nanny with bipolar disorder. Freshly released from a five-year stint of psychiatric hospitalization following arson.

   Ohhhh. It’s gonna be so sad. ‘The philanthropist was just trying to be philanthropic!’ That’s what they’ll say!

   Who could blame him?

   How was he supposed to know that the nanny would go manic, kidnap the kid, and then riddled with remorse, hang the kid and then herself?

   It’ll be so sad.

   So so sad.

   But how to make sure it happens that way?

   Well, better hire a world-renowned dyspeptic hitman. He’ll be sure to get ’er done. Make it look just right.

         ———

   Unfortunately for them, the ‘bad’ have grossly underestimated the ‘mad’. The nanny is hell to deal with off her meds.

   Escaping the initial assassination attempt, “[w]ith a dead branch she drew a large heart in the sand in front of her, and inside it she wrote: HERE LIVED… THE RABID BITCH.…. She pictured men flirting with her — and her shooting them point-blank. I must be in a manic phase, she told herself.”

   Dashing thru France, a scorched trail of destruction in their wake, go the nanny and child, and the hitman.

         ——–

   Terrific, brisk, cinematic short novel. At dizzying speed, 163 pages might as well be 163 mph.

   Manchette, Hammett acolyte, shows you rather than tells you. You feel it thru the visceral description of the action and the surroundings. You rarely hear anyone’s thoughts. You feel fear because the circumstances are frightening. Not because a character tells you they are afraid. Be very afraid.

   Highly recommended.

● CORNELL WOOLRICH – Black Alibi. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1942. Paperback reprints include: HandiBook #14, 194?; Jonathan Press, 194?; Collier, 1965; Ballantine, 1982.

● THE LEOPARD MAN. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943. Dennis O’Keefe, Margo, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell. Based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich. Producer: Val Lewton. Director: Jacques Tourneur .

   So it was time to get back to the Classics, and in my book, that’s Cornell Woolrich. Black Alibi isn’t terribly well-structured — it consists mainly of a growingly repetitious series of rather lengthy vignettes of young girls going to meet untimely and violent ends at the hands of…. well, it’s a Mystery, isn’t it? — but it contains some of Woolrich’s richest prose, and that’s saying quite a lot.

   Alibi offers scene after scene of startling imagery, deft metaphor, and everything else that makes the words a pleasure to read, even when the book itself gets a bit tiresome.

   Black Alibi was filmed by the Val Lewton unit at RKO just a year after the book came out, and Woolrich never found an auteur more attuned to his peculiar sensibilities than Val Lewton. Lewton made “B” movies and Woolrich wrote pulp, but both men were compulsive poets, and The Leopard Man is one of the more meticulous Woolrich-to-film adaptations: bits of dialogue, trifling incidents, and minor characters from the book all show up on the screen under Lewton’s careful supervision and the classy direction of Jacques Tourneur, which seems to capture even the metaphors from Woolrich’s novel.

   Given the faithfulness of this film, I’ve sometimes wondered about the exact contributions of the screenwriters, Ardel Wray and Edward Dein. It takes a certain amount of talent not to mess  up a good story when putting it across the screen, so I can understand Wray’s contribution: she worked on a couple other Lewton films and a better-than average series entry, The Falcon and the Coeds. But I wonder what “additional dialogue” may have been contributed by Edward Dein, a writer whose dubious credits include Jungle Woman, Calypso Joe, and Shack Out on  101. Just one of those unexplained mysteries of The Cinemah, I guess.