ELLERY QUEEN – Double, Double. Little Brown, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #874, paperback, 1952. Dell, paperback, 1965. Ballantine, paperback, 1975, 1979. Also published in a Signet double novel edition, and as The Case of the Seven Murders (Pocket, paperback, 1958).

   A series of anonymous envelopes sent to Ellery Queen from Wrightsville filled with clippings from the local newspaper there is what first piques the well-known mystery writer’s interest. This is followed up by a visit from the daughter of the local “town drunk,” who has mysteriously disappeared and is assumed to have met with foul play and to be dead, his body swallowed up by quicksand at the bottom of a cliff.

   The girl is somewhat of a “bird child,” living barefoot and alone in a shack at the edge of a swamp. (You should not be surprised to learn that her name is Rima.) Before the two of them return to Wrightsville, Ellery plays Pygmalion with her, furnishing her with new clothes, up-to-date hair styling and the like.

   Wrightsville is a small town somewhere in New England, with small town stores and small town businesses, a local doctor who still makes house calls, and a place Ellery has a strange affinity for, with at least three previous cases having taken place there. The townspeople know him well.

   Three deaths have already occurred, one suspicious, the other two not. Before the book is done, a total of seven have taken place. I suppose it does no harm to tell you now that the pattern that Ellery discovers connecting them comes from the nursery rhyme that begins “Rich man, poor man…”

   This being the first Ellery Queen novel I’ve read in a while, I was caught by surprise at how chaotic his detective stories could be: swirling winds of surrealism and the unknown. Added to the mix are suspicion, doubts, small town nostalgia, and karma. The final solution, the one that unravels the mystery at the end, is, in fact, greatly dependent on the latter. Events have happened that even the killer could not control.

   The detective work is superb – it is utterly fascinating to read a novel in which so many threads of the story could be so knotted up and elusive – then unsnarled so the pieces all fit together. Except … except for the fact that in an Ellery Queen story the people do not act or react as real people would. They are in a sense both naive and artificial, and they do things that real people would not do – especially the killer, as hard as Ellery Queen the detective does his best to explain his or her thinking.

   I do not mean to suggest that this is a bad thing, except perhaps for present day readers who do not understand the worth of a pure puzzle story.  You start to read an Ellery Queen novel, and you  will find yourself at once in an Ellery Queen world governed by Ellery Queen rules and Ellery Queen ways of thinking.

   Opinions on this may vary, but I found myself enjoying this return visit to the world of Ellery Queen, a visit I’ve delayed for far too long. Shame on me.

   Points of interest online, perhaps:
   

● A recent blog (only three entries, so far, unless I’m missing others) is called Crime Film Hub Daily, with links to news and reviews of, guess what, crime films online.

         https://crimefilmhub.com/
   

● From a follower of this blog named Greg Karber: “I’m a huge fan of fairplay mysteries, and I’ve channeled that affection into an interactive murder-mystery logic-puzzle game called Murdle.”

         https://gtkmysteries.com/murdle

   â€œI’m trying to share it with people I think might be interested. The mysteries get more complicated and difficult throughout the week, like the crossword, so if today’s too easy, just wait for tomorrow’s!”
   

● From Bob Byrne, a regular contributor to the Black Gate website:

   â€œBack when the world blew up early in 2020, I began writing about a thousand words a day, about Archie Goodwin’s life, locked in the brownstone with Nero Wolfe.

   “I wrote about 42,000 words over 45 days, posting them nightly at the Wolfe Pack FB page.

   “I’m posting them weekly now at Black Gate, giving them a more permanent home. Here is this week’s entry – I’m up to Day 38:

         Black Gate/Nero Wolfe

   “Each installment includes all my prior Wolfe musings and stories, including a solo Archie adventure that won a Wolfe Pack contest last year.”

THE TEXAS RANGERS. Paramount, 1936. Fred MacMurray, Lloyd Nolan, Jean Parker, and Jack Oakie. Screenplay by King Vidor, Elizabeth Hill, and Louis Stevens, from the book by Walter Prescott Webb. Directed by King Vidor. Currently streaming on YouTube.

   A trio of desperadoes get separated while fleeing from a posse. Two of them join the Texas Rangers as cover, and gradually find themselves becoming committed to the Ranger mission, while the third forms a new gang and continues on his thievin’ murderin’ way, and if you can’t tell what develops….

   Despite the formulaic plot, this is far far from routine, thanks to Vidor’s assured direction and the performances from the leads. Until he hooked up with Disney and My Three Sons, MacMurray always lent a kind of equivocal edge to his roles that contrasted uneasily with his bluff good looks, and it makes him perfect as the bad guy turned hero (for now). Oakie’s good-for-little bravura makes a fine comedy relief, and Nolan’s big-city look suits his character just fine.

   But it’s Vidor’s sensitive handling of stock situations and his flair for action scenes that lifts Rangers out of its cliche’d roots.

   F’rinstance, there’s a bit where the Rangers are trapped on a cliffside, holding off angry Apaches down below. A few of the more ambitious Native Americans climb up above and start laboriously rolling boulders down at the Rangers. Vidor’s smooth way of cutting (The boulders come at intervals, thundering down the near-sheer wall like a cannon shot, as the rangers claw their way up the cliff to stop them) from long-shots, to medium exteriors, to studio “exteriors” propels the scene to epic proportions.

   Then, in quieter moments, the emotional resonance he puts into the scene where Nolan and Oakie have it out — Oakie’s braggadocio melting as he realizes how dangerous his old pal has become, Nolan losing control of himself, and visibly enjoying it — has stuck with me since I was a kid, and followed me into my dotage.

   Jimmy Stewart called moments like these “Pieces of time.” I call it fine movie-making and great fun.

FRANK KANE – Red Hot Ice. Johnny Liddell #9. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1955. Dell 901, paperback, 1956, Cover by Victor Kalin.

   Johnny Liddell is hired by the long-suffering agent of a luscious former star who’s become an uncontrollable lush, and as a result, she now owes $12,000 to the owner of an traveling airborne casino (which is quite an  opening gimmick in its own right). To that end she agrees to pay him off using a small fortune in uncut diamonds she’s hidden from the IRS over the years.

   When Johnny hires a guy to monitor the transfer, both the guy and the blonde end up dead. The cops think Johnny’s buddy couldn’t resist temptation, and things went bad when he did. Johnny naturally sees things differently, but it’s up to him to prove it.

   Kane’s prose is smooth and easy in this one. There are no highs, à la Raymond Chandler — I found no particular lines or longer passages worth quoting, as on occasion I do do – but there are no lows, either. What follows is a lengthy and straightforward murder investigation, in which Frank Kane, the author, is quite good in describing rundown if not out-and-out squalid settings in the city (Manhattan) and environs (New Jersey and Long Island). The latter in fact is where in fact Johnny is at one point taken for a ride – a fairly standard cliché in these kinds of stories, but Kane somehow manages to make it seem fresh again.

   Even better is that not only is Red Hot Ice a pretty good PI novel, it is also a detective story, complete with fair play alibis and other clues – well almost. If the New Jersey police had done their job thoroughly, and not just a one-sided one, the case would have been solved all that more quickly – the only semi-sour note I found in this one. Not a classic, in other words, but you can do a lot worse.

RIO. Universal Pictures, 1939. Basil Rathbone, Sigrid Gurie, Victor McLaglen, Robert Cummings, Leo Carrillo, Billy Gilbert, Samuel S. .Hinds. Screenplay by Abden Kandel, Edwin Justus Mayer & Frank Partos. Directed by John Brahm. Current;y available om YouTube.

   Contrary to director John Brahm’s film noir credentials (The Lodger, Hangover Square, The Brasher Doubloon) Rio is not an early example of that genre as often suggested half as much as a late blooming of German Expressionism and silent melodrama that anticipates those elements in film noir.

   It probably didn’t help that the title Rio sounds more like a musical with Fred and Ginger dancing on the wings of an airplane than a melodrama loosely based on an international scandal.

   Here Rathbone is Paul Reynard (rather obviously named, reynard being “fox” in French), a fantastic Parisian financial figure whose massive empire proves to be merely a paper facade held together by unsecured bank loans upon bank loans and Reynard’s superhuman cool. When that empire collapses after a loan is called in by a rival taking many of his investors fortunes with it the whole thing implodes.

   Loosely based on the Stavisky scandal that shook France and inspired a film (Stavisky, 1974) that starred Jean Paul Belmondo as Serge Stavisky the great swindler Rio adds to the character of the real life Stavisky a kind of cold genius and Svengali like influence over Reybard’s wife a once popular entertainer Irene (Norweigian actress Sigrid Gurie, Algiers, The Adventures of Marco Polo) who he possessively loves in his own controlling way.

   Following the collapse of his financial empire the coolly unrepentant Reynard is arrested and put on trial. On conviction he is sentenced to a Devil’s Island like prison near Brazil and Irene, with his right hand man and bodyguard, Dirk (Victor McLaglen), agree to follow him to wait for him in Rio, Reynard urging her to divorce him and bragging to Dirk that he knows giving her that out will only serve to assure she doesn’t leave him out of loyalty. Even from his island prison he will continue to manipulate her, which is his only true pleasure.

   There Irene takes up singing again in a bar owned by Roberto (Leo Carillo), a slinky type hoping to undermine her devotion to Reynard, while Dirk works as a bartender to be near Irene and protect Reynard’s interests.

   Meanwhile in prison Reynard is the same arrogant Nietzschean ubermensch, content with his lot so long as he knows he still controls Irene even from afar, her letters proof of that control.

   Back in Rio Irene meets drunken American Bill Gregory (Robert Cummings), an engineer who was responsible for a bridge that collapsed thanks to investors who supplied him with inferior materials. Now he is drinking himself to death in disgrace and shame.

   But he has some charm, and unlike the cold Reynard he needs Irene. She helps him to reform, sober up, and get a job as an engineer, and this time he does a spectacular job of it. Redeemed and in love he convinces Irene to divorce Reynard and marry him.

   Humiliated by the guards he has taunted because he letters have stopped and furious his control of Irene has been lost Reynard vows to kill the two lovers and plots escape, luring another prisoner into the suicidal attempt planning to kill the other prisoner and plant his id on the unidentifiable body,

   Able to contact Dirk for help Reynard escapes, “dies,” murders his fellow prisoner, and is free, if only he wasn’t insistent on coming to Rio to murder Irene and Bill for their betrayal despite Dirk’s pleas.

   Rio is a peculiar film. It seems closer to silent melodrama than modern film noir, and while it could be noir with just a turn here or there it isn’t in this incarnation, not quite.

   Rathbone is perfect as Reynard, by turns cooly charming and sadistic, admiring his wife the way a snake looks at a bird, reading volumes into a glance. Gurie is quite lovely and persuasive both as the wife under Reynard’s hypnotic control and as the woman slowly freeing herself from his interest. While he had no need to model his performance on anyone Rathbone does, at times, seem to be channeling the kind of silent film roles often played by Conrad Veidt.

   The film belongs to Rathbone though. Cummings has some good moments as a charming drunk but soon enough sobers up to be a somewhat standard, but far more skillful than usual, male ingenue. He seems a bit young for Gurie, but you can see the appeal after Rathbone’s snake like Reynard.

   There are a number of evocative scenes and shots (nice cinematography by Hal Mohr) showing how well Brahm had absorbed the lessons of German expressionism and would later use them in his film noir works. Stylistically Rio is an attractive film.

   It’s odd how misused and underused McLaglen is in this film. He has relatively little screen time and what time he does have is mostly in the kind of role you were more likely to see Walter Brennan or Thomas Mitchell in. McLaglen at this point was an Oscar winning actor and a star in his own right both teamed in films with the likes of Edmond Lowe and Chester Morris, and as a lead on his own having played the lead in two John Ford films (The Informer, Black Watch).

   It’s downright strange to see him play so small, if important, a supporting role in the film. Leo Carrillo is wasted too as the wastrel owner of the place where Irene performs. He is suggested as an oily type after Irene’s honor, but is awfully jovial about giving up when she ends up with Cummings. His role mostly consists of trying to scare gossipy waiter Billy Gilbert into shutting up. He never more than annoys Irene a little.

   Rio is an odd film. Rathbone is the main reason to watch, but by no means the only one. It’s also interesting to note American audiences in 1939 would be expected to immediately draw the inference to the Stavisky scandal that rocked France earlier in the decade. I’m not sure a modern film would dare to imagine an American audience would be that familiar with an international scandal, but here the film expects the audience to have some familiarity with those events and connect Reynard with Stavisky effortlessly.

A. G. E. CROMWELL – Death in the Copse. Rodney Wayne #2. Wright & Brown, UK, hardcover, 1940.

   This is the second of just two private detective novels written by the almost entirely unknown A. G. E. Cromwell, the first adventure of Rodney Wayne being Murder in Flat 14 (Wright & Brown, 1939). The two books can be found on the Internet at varying prices, but as for the author himself, I have found only a single reference to him, that being an announcement for one of his books in a contemporaneous Australian newspaper. (If you can find more, please by all means, let me know.)

   Wayne eventually has a client in Death in the Copse, but at the beginning, he’s only on his way to a weekend stay at a good friend’s countryside mansion, a short train ride from London. The friend is Archie Crofts, a good-natured, self-made but very wealthy businessman. Besides the staff, there is a small groups of other friends also staying for the weekend, so when Archie is found shot to death at night in a small area of a forest, the number of suspects is also very limited. (The killer is seen running back to the house after the fatal shot is heard, so there is no talk of a passing tramp being responsible.)

   Wayne finds himself somewhat at odds with the local police inspector, at least at first, but when Wayne decides he won’t get anywhere by going head to head with him, he persuades himself to join forces with him. There is a lot of discussion of alibis between the two of them, including the strange behavior of one possible witness who has to have an alibi for another twisted out of him instead of his being up front and forward about it. We have probably read enough mysteries ourselves to know what that means, don’t we?

   Cromwell himself clearly had read enough works of detective himself to be able to produce a quite decent and very readable one on his own. Until the last chapter, that is, which is, to put it bluntly, a disappointment. Once you put the book down and you start asking yourself, in terms of the figuring out what really did happen, why does the final explanation almost completely contradict what we told was observed earlier?

   An interesting artifact of its day, but not one, I’d say, worth searching out for. (I’d send you mine, but unfortunately it has a page missing from the end of a chapter somewhere in the middle. By no means is it an essential one, but it *is* missing.)

LEO BRUCE – Death in Albert Park. Carolus Deene #13.   W. H. Allen, UK, hardcover, 1964. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1979. Academy Chicago Publishers, US, paperback, 2005.

   This thirteenth case of  Senior History Master Carolus Deene of the Queen’s School, Newminster, was originally published in 1964 by W. H. Allen & Co. of London, and there have been at least ten subsequent titles featuring the forty-year-old teacher. The present title, however, would appear to be only the sixth to be published in the United States to date. Since it is the first of the “Death” titles, however, perhaps Scribners intends to continue the series., which would be a real treat.

   Deene bakes an interest in London affairs when three middle-aged women from the depressing suburb surrounding Albert Park in the remote southeastern part of the city are fatally knifed between the shoulder blades. The teacher’s interest in crime as history prompts him to investigate the backgrounds of the victims to see if, indeed, they were just random targets of a crazed psychotic popularly called the Stabber.

   There is some hilarious satirizing of the excesses in the contemporary theater along the way; and we meet some of the not-too-likeable regulars in the persons of Deene’s housekeeper and cook, Mrs. Stick, a stickler for appearances, and young, precocious student Robert Priggley who even annoys Deene but who sometimes serves as bis own personal “irregular.”

   Deene’s interference is not in the least appreciated by Detective Superintendent Dyke who does everything to thwart his interviews. Also adverse to his investigative hobby is his school headmaster, the cowering Mr. Garringer.

   This particular novel employs a plot device reminiscent of a famous 1936 Christie, though handled quite differently. Mr. Bruce is a deft hand in creating suspense, and he carefully plays fair with the reader in his deployment of clues.     The first Carolus Deene novel was At Death’s Door (1955) , and Leo Bruce is also the creator of series Character Sergeant Beef.

For some strange reason, as yet unfathomed by me, I can receive email, but I can’t send any out. I’m going to need the help of a computer guru who knows a lot more than I. Nothing that affects the blog, though, that I know of.

JEROME WEIDMAN – I’ll Never Go There Any More. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1941. Reprinted in paperback several times, including Avon T-153, 1956, shown below:

   Two Summers and a lifetime ago, I picked up a novel at a Used Book Store just to be polite; I wasn’t really looking for it, but it seemed interesting and the shopkeeper looked bored, so I figured to brighten her day for two dollars and fifty cents.

   The book was I’ll Never Go There Any More,  by Jerome Weidman, and it’s a young-man-in-New-York novel, a colorful, sprawling thing about Arthur Thacker coming to the big city, meeting lots of colorful, sprawling people, and learning about Life in all its sprawling color.

   And it ain’t bad, either. The characters are well-drawn, the story moves apace, and the ending seems fateful and natural, profound and shocking, all at once, just the right coda for a young-man-in-New York novel. It looks to have been published just before America entered World War II, which is probably why it isn’t better remembered today – after December 7, readers had a lot more on their minds than the adventures of a young man in New York.

   But as I was reading this thing, getting the background on the various characters popping in and out, I came upon six or eight pages that seemed kind of familiar: something about an Italian banker and his sons, and how they all turned out. Damn, it just kept reminding me of something.

   So I did some research and found that this was the basis of Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1949 movie House of Strangers. Not the book: just these six or eight pages. That’s right, Twentieth Century Fox bought I’ll Never Go There Any More, tossed out three hundred and thirty pages of it, and filmed what was left. House of Strangers is an okay noir drama, but I always felt it lacked a proper pay-off at the end, and it’s certainly very far removed from Weidman’s novel.

   But that’s not the end of our story. No, friends. Because in 1954 the studio did what studios always did in those days: they took the script of House of Strangers, added some guns and horses and re-made it as Broken Lance. And that’s how Jerome Weidman’s young-man-in-New-York novel ended up as a Western.

BROKEN LANCE. 20th Century Fox, 1954. Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Jean Peters, Richard Widmark, Katy Jurado, Eduard Franz, Hugh O’Brian, E. G. Marshall, Earl Holliman, Carl Benton Reid. Screenplay by Richard Murphy based on the screenplay for House of Strangers by Philip Yordan. Director: Edward Dmytryk.

   By 1954 when this drama of a family in conflict and brothers at each others throats was made, the Western was the dominant form of entertainment in theaters around the country, and the simple morality plays of an earlier era had been replaced with far more complex and adult themes. Novels, histories, and original screenplays were being churned out in great number and it was perhaps natural that Hollywood would turn to its own products for the basis of new material for the seemingly endless demand for new Westerns.

   It had already begun in the Post War-era. Raoul Walsh remade his own High Sierra as Colorado Territory, John Ford’s Four Men and a Prayer was remade as Fury at Furnace Creek, Kiss of Death as The Fiend Who Walked the West, Objective Burma as Distant Drums, and soon Asphalt Jungle as Badlanders, The Lost Patrol as The Last of the Comanches, even Gunga Din as Sergeants 3.

   Broken Lance was a remake of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1949 film noir House of Strangers. In that one Edward G. Robinson was the patriarch of an Italian banking family whose favorite son, Richard Conte who loves society woman Susan Hayward, goes to jail to save the old man when he gets in trouble with his high-handed ways only to find his brothers led by Luther Adler out to destroy him and cheat him out of his part of the family fortune when he finishes his prison term.

   Here Spencer Tracy is Matt Devereaux, cattle rancher and pioneer who has died while his youngest son Joseph (Robert Wagner) was in prison. Joe’s half brothers Ben, Mike, and Denny (Richard Widmark, Hugh O’Brian, and Earl Holliman Jr.) try to buy him out and send him packing when Joe is released, but Joe still has business and memories to deal with.

   The movie opens with a lobo wolf running wild across the landscape. We will later see Matt refuse to let son Denny shoot the same wolf, and at one point Matt’s Native American foreman (Eudard Franz) tells Joseph that Matt’s spirit runs with the wolves. We see and hear the wolf a final time as the music rises and The End appears hammering home the theme.

   The story is told in flashback, and to Mankiewicz’s plot, Dmytryk and screenwriter Richard Murphy add a sub plot about racism and intolerance since Wagner’s Mother (Katy Jurado, who was only six years older than Wagner) is Native American, a source of many not so subtle snubs from Matt’s business partners..

   When Old Matt takes on a copper mine poisoning his source of water and destroys the place he finds his friend the territorial governor (E. G. Marshall — and yes the film several times refers to Arizona as a state well before that happened) is unwilling to help him unless he stops Joe from romancing his daughter Barbara (Jean Peters).

   The legal proceedings go badly and Joe volunteers to go to prison to save his father striking a deal to only serve a short sentence if Matt will sell the land to the copper interests, but when the time comes older brother Ben refuses to sign, Joe is sent to prison for three years, and Matt has a stroke confronted by Ben and his brothers refusal to help Joe.

   While Joe is in prison the brothers undo everything Old Matt built and eventually cause his death in a well done scene reminiscent of the end of El Cid. But Joe wants no part of fratricide having said his goodbyes to his dead father and is ready to leave when Ben decides he would never sleep well as long as Joe was alive and decides to kill him.

   Beautifully shot by cinematographer Joe MacDonald, with a strong score by Leigh Harline, and imaginatively staged by director Edward Dmytryk, Broken Lance is a satisfying adult Western with the shoot ’em up action nicely balanced by family drama, a trial, and Tracy in larger than life scene stealing mode (there are two life sized portraits of Tracy featured in the film I would kill to own).

   An avid polo player when he was younger Tracy sits a horse well and looks natural in the saddle. At this point he was still active enough to look believable in action scenes.

   Widmark is good (when isn’t he?) as Ben the resentful older brother who hates his father enough to destroy every thing and everyone around him including his half brother. O’Brian and Holliman fill out the roles of the two wastrel middle brother well enough though neither has much to do.

   Of course Katy Jurado is fine in anything she plays and in this period has one fine role after another. Eduard Franz plays Old Matt’s Native foreman and surrogate father to Wagner’s character with his usual quiet efficiency (he plays a similar role as a tracker in The Burning Hills). Peters, Marshall, Reid are all solid in their various supporting bits as well.

   The star here though, despite Tracy’s top billing, is Wagner, who is in almost every scene as the decent loyal son, and holds his own opposite the likes of Tracy (Wagner knew many of the Old Hollywood elites well, including Tracy who he had caddied for when he was younger) and Widmark. He played opposite O’Brian in The White Feather, so this was old home week in some ways.

   It’s no easy task for a young actor to even stay on the screen with the likes of Tracy (they played brothers in The Mountain) and Widmark, but he does it with ease. He was always at ease on screen, perhaps too much so for his own growth as an actor, but here he more than manages the unenviable trick of having to hold the screen when viewers are waiting for more of Tracy and Widmark.

   Incidentally there is a quiet scene with Tracy and Widmark that is almost a masterclass in two screen naturals subtly battling for screen dominance and coming to a draw without either of them ever once slipping out of character or crossing the obvious line into scene stealing. Widmark’s quiet self assurance on screen with Tracy, expressed in his relaxed posture, even adds to the tension between their characters in the film.