SHIRLEY JACKSON – The Haunting of Hill House. Viking, hardcover, 1959. Popular Library, paperback, 1962. Reprinted many times. Film#1: Argyle, 1963, as The Haunting (director: Robert Wise). Film #2: DreamWorks, 1999, as The Haunting (director: Jan de Bont).

   Eleanor is lonely. Very, very lonely.

   A 30ish shy caretaker for her now dead mother, she lets a room in her sister’s house.

   Lucky her, she sees an ad. A professor is looking for volunteers to spend the summer at a well-known supposedly ‘haunted house’ to research psychic phenomena and prove the existence of the paranormal. Room and board included.

   Eleanor’s got nothing better to do. So writes back to the PO Box, steals her sister’s car and drives out to the house.

   There’s a group of four: Professor, Eleanor, another unattached young woman, and Luke, an eligible bachelor who stands to inherit the estate.

   The house is labyrinth. Lots of doors and halls and connected rooms, many without windows. It’s nearly impossible to navigate. It’s dark. The heavy doors won’t stay open.

   Inexplicable noises appear in the night. The doors shake. They’re coming for me. I should let myself go. Then they’ll leave you alone, Eleanor says to the others. They’re only after me.

   One night, Eleanor’s name is found written on a wall. Urging her to come home. Maybe she wrote it herself.

   But I have no home, says Eleanor.

   This is my home.

   The home wants me here.

   Eleanor begins to believe, more and more, that she belongs. Finally, she belongs. She must stay here forever.

   Her erratic behavior is interfering with the Professor’s investigations. She’s becoming very annoying to the others. They ask her to leave.

   But she can’t.

         ___

   Can’t say I loved it. It was okay. A bit of a slog. And, in a haunted sense, nothing much happens. On the other hand, the subtlety of the haunting, the blurring of ghosts and schizophrenia, makes it more believable. I guess if it wasn’t called “The Haunting of Hill House” and was just called “Eleanor Goes Insane,” I’d have liked it more.

   Now have read both this and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I prefer. It is about 2 eccentric lonely sisters in a dilapidated old mansion at the center for a conservative little town. One is a beautiful and waifish maiden, thought by all to have been the murderess of the remainder of their family. The other, an ugly, impish creature, thought to be dumb, but with a hateful, plotting mind. I suppose I like it more because I believe in insanity more than I believe in ghosts.

RAOLD DAHL – Someone Like You. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1953. Dell #F139, paperback, 1961. Reprinted many times.

   Roald Dahl’s short stories have been called-among other things — bizarre, comic, horrific, clever, and playful. Dahl depicts a world where things are a little — or sometimes a lot — skewed from the world we know, and the events he chronicles often produce wrenching horror in his reader. But he has also been known to inject a comic twist into his stories, and he toys with the reader, teasing the story line along like a mischievous child until he has us completely fooled.

   Perhaps his most famous story is “Lamb to  the Slaughter.” It begins on a deceptively quiet note, with Mary Maloney waiting in her cozy parlor for her husband to come home from work. Mary is a devoted housewife, six months pregnant, and she takes excellent care of her policeman husband, but tonight she has neglected to take anything out of the freezer. And when she does, after her husband makes a startling announcement, a leg of lamb seems quite appropriate …..

   “Taste” likewise deals with food. Mike Schofield, a London epicure, is giving a dinner party to which he has invited a famous gourmet. Mike is proud of his wine cellar and anxious to trip up his guest on his knowledge of fine but obscure vintages. In fact, he is so sure of his ability to do so that he makes a most dangerous wager.

   These first two stories are examples of Dahl’s lighter work. On the more serious side is “Man from the South,” which concerns a different, more deadly wager. In “The Soldier,” Dahl makes a subtle statement about the aftermath of war. And readers and writers alike will be both amused and shaken at the implications of “The Great Automatic Grammatisator.”

   This collection shows Dahl at his best. Other volumes of his varied and multifaceted short stories include Kiss, Kiss (1960), The Best of Roald Dahl ( 1978), and Tales of the Unexpected (1979). In addition, he has written two novels: Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen (1948) and My Uncle Oswald (1979).

     ———
   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.

“To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

               =

“In one of the Bard’s best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.”

AMOR TOWLES – A Gentleman in Moscow.  Viking, hardcover, 2016. Penguin Books, softcover, 2019.

   I just spent two pleasant weeks in the company of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, and feel duty-bound to recommend in the most glowing possible terms that the readers out there avail themselves of his companionship. He can be found at the Metropol Hotel, in (where else?) Moscow, anytime between 1922 and 1956.

   The count is thus so readily and consistently available owing to the fact that in the first chapter he is tried by the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (This is in 1922, when the Revolution was still fresh) and sentenced to Life under House Arrest. Since he’s been living at Moscow’s luxurious Hotel Metropol, that would seem none too bad, but he’s unceremoniously moved from his regal suite to a tiny room in the belfry, barely large enough to stand upright and move around in, which will be home base in his hotel-world for the next thirty years. Nothing daunted, Rostov sets about turning his gilded cage into a vantage point from which to see and savor Life.

   The novel that ensues from this premise is four-hundred-and-some-pages of pure pleasure, mostly because Towles writes like a man who enjoys writing, and conveys that joy with vivid descriptions of food, drink, rare warm days, starry Moscow nights, beautiful women, good movies (He even picks out a moment in Casablanca I never noticed!) good deeds done by important people, and great things done by good people.

   Don’t get the notion, though, that this is Rebecca of Metropol Hotel.   Towles takes us through the idealism and chaos of the Bolsheviks, to Stalin’s genocidal reign, Hitler’s invasion, and the ascent of Khrushchev. And he conveys the lethal idiocy of bureaucracy to chilling effect, as some of those nearest to Rostov find their life’s work — and their lives — tossed aside by the arrogance of the genuinely stupid.

   A Gentleman in Moscow is a complex and richly varied work, even one that requires some effort from the reader. But it rewards the effort with characters who come alive on the page, and with a tale you won’t forget.

PACIFIC BLACKOUT. Paramount Pictures, 1941. Robert Preston, Martha O’Driscoll, Philip Merrivale, Eva Gabor, Louis Jean Heydt, Thurston Hall, J. Edward Bromberg, Mary Treen, Monte Blue, Rod Cameron. Screenplay: Lester Cole & W. P. Lipscomb. Story by  Franz Spencer (Franz Schulz) & Curt Siodmak. Directed by Ralph Murphy.

   As Seattle prepares for its first city wide blackout of the pre-War era replete with the Army providing bombers to drop faux weapons, Robert Draper (Robert Preston), a young inventor who has been working on range finder for the Army, is on trial for murdering his partner, and it looks bad for him, what with French nightclub singer Marie Duval (Eva Gabor) swearing he is guilty, though he swears he never met her.

   John Runnel (Philip Merrivale), an expert on blackouts, is advising the city and a friend of Draper’s, but there is nothing he can do when Draper is convicted and sentenced to death (they move fast in B -movies).

   While being transferred to prison that night as the blackout begins, there is an accident and Draper escapes, and while trying to find a way out of his handcuffs, he meets Mary Jones (Martha O’Driscoll), who is walking her dog in the park.

   Mary is one of those screwball types you could only find in a movie of this era, and in short order she is helping Preston in his escape through a series of misadventures that fill up most of the movie a la a more urban 39 Steps (one of the most oft repeated plots in Hollywood history, even by Hitchcock).

   About midway through, the big secret regarding the villain is revealed, but it isn’t until right at the end we discover the McGuffin: saboteurs have substituted a real bomb for one of the phony ones to be dropped on Seattle by pilot Rod Cameron’s unsuspecting crew.

   To the extent this works its because of Preston and O’Driscoll, and a decent performance by a young Eva Gabor as the French girl whose testimony has been extorted by the unexpected German spy behind the whole thing. J. Edward Bomberg has a nice bit in a medical treatment shelter as a slight of hand artist turned pick pocket who helps Preston out in a tight.

   I’m curious if there ever was a blackout quite as extravagant as this one, but being on the West Coast and knowing Spielberg’s 1941 was loosely based on fact it is just in the realm of possibility (probably not with bombers dropping bags informing kids they have just been killed by poison gas).

   This is by turns screwball comedy, spy thriller, murder mystery, and patriotic flag waver, but makes so many sudden turns you may get a little dizzy trying to follow it. It never manages to all come together, but individual bits are worth seeing, and Preston is always good.

THE CLOSER. “Pilot.” TNT, 13 June 2005 (Season 1, Episode 1). Kyra Sedgwick (Brenda Leigh Johnson), J. K. Simmons (Will Pope), Corey Reynolds, Robert Gossett, and a large ensemble cast. Guest star: Allison Smith. Written by James Duff. Directed by Michael M. Robin. Currently streaming on HBOMax.

   One of the bigger hits on cable non-network TV, The Closer was on for seven summers on TNT before transforming itself into Major Crimes, a spinoff which continued on and lasted for another six years. You can’t tell me why I’m so slow, because I don’t know myself, but when I watched this, the pilot for the first season, it was the first episode I’ve ever seen of either series.

   And now I’m kicking myself, as I enjoyed this one immensely. As all good pilots do, it introduces the major players clearly and emphatically, while at the same time telling a good story, one with a bit of a twist at the end. Admittedly we do get to know the lesser members of the ensemble cast only in passing. To all intents and purposes, this is a one-woman show, Kyra Sedgwick as no-nonsense, ass-kicking Brenda Johnson, who is hired from outside to head up LAPD’s Priority Homicide Division.

   Her blunt personality wins her no friends on the force. Other than Brenda’s new boss, Will Pope, who hired her, all of the others turn in their resignations about 20 minutes into this first episode. I don’t know how long into the season it will take for her to win all of them over for good, but by the time she’s cracked her first case, it appears that she’s received at  a small modicum of respect, at least, grudgingly as it may be.

   And as far as the case is concerned, when the mutilated and burned body of a woman is found in the home of a high-tech millionaire, who has disappeared. Strangely, none of his fingerprints are in the house, only the victim’s. Brenda’s trademarked final closing scene is what it takes to induce a confession from the killer, an ending that clearly and forcefully delivered, the first of many to come.

   What I’m about to describe sounds like a coincidence worthy of Harry Stephen Keeler, but it really happened. During the year 1928 two young men of New York, working in the advertising and publicity fields, spent most of their evenings, weekends and vacation time collaborating on a detective novel for submission to a writing contest with a $7,500 prize.

   Their names were Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, and the byline they used for their novel was Ellery Queen. They won the contest (only to lose it again, but that’s another story) and eventually became world-famous under that byline.

   Many of their subsequent novels and stories centered around a cryptic message left by the murder victim.

   Now comes the hard-to-believe part. During that same year 1928 a book was published which consisted of three long stories plus a framing story. The first of the long stories, “The Giant Moth,” was also about two young men in the advertising business who had written a detective novel for a prize competition.

   On the eve of the announcement of the winner, one of the two—a fellow named Wilk Casperson who’s desperate to win and use his share of the money to set up housekeeping with the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker—goes to a masquerade ball at the mansion of his girlfriend’s father dressed as, you guessed it, a giant moth, and quickly becomes involved in a murder whose victim apparently left behind him, you guessed it again, a dying message.

   Who wrote this story? The King of Koinkydink. The nuttiest filbert of them all. In his middle twenties, after a few years of turning out fairly ordinary short stories, usually with O. Henry twist endings, Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967) became more ambitious and, beginning in 1914, concentrated on much longer tales. Usually works of such length are called short novels, novelettes, novelets or novellas. Harry liked to call them novellos, probably with the accent on the first syllable.

   â€œThe Giant Moth” first appeared in Top-Notch, 1 June 1918, at about 35,000 words. Ten years later and at least 20,000 words longer, it became the tale of the first prisoner in Keeler’s SING SING NIGHTS (Dutton, 1928).

   Fast forward almost a century and it still stands up as a beautiful example of the kind of plot only Keeler could devise. With two characters dressed as moths attending the same masquerade ball at different times, two supplies of disappearing ink, a Chinese gangster who like-a to speak-a in de Italian dialecto, a missing diamond necklace, a murdered lepidopterist, an enigmatic Japanese servant, and a secret map giving away the defenses of the Panama Canal, the story has enough wackadoodle elements for three times its length, but let’s focus on the dying message.

   Paralyzed from the waist down after being shot in the back, and with no pen or pencil within reach, the mothologist in his last moments apparently made use of what he did have available—some strips of tissue paper and rubber type used to make out classification cards for his specimens—to leave the following message:

             FIND

            USHI

               HE

           KNOWS

   Ushi is the name of the moth maven’s servant, who has vanished. No reader in a million years could figure out the real meaning of that message and no writer other than Keeler could have dreamed up the gimmick. Whether Fred Dannay or Manny Lee ever heard of the tale remains unknown.

   The Ellery Queen novels and stories proved to be so popular in the 1930s that at the end of the decade a network radio series about the character was launched, with Hugh Marlowe (1911-1982) as EQ. The prime mover behind the series was George Zachary (1911-1964), who served as producer and director from its debut on CBS as an hour-long program (18 June 1939) till its departure in 30-minute form on 22 September 1940.

   In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, the series returned on the NBC Red Network, with Carleton Young (1907-1971) as Ellery. Zachary continued as producer but was replaced in his other capacity by two men from the Ruthrauff & Ryan advertising agency’s stable of directors working in alternation, Bruce Kamman and the man we are to follow.

   Knowles Entrikin (1880-1956) is almost completely forgotten today, but in his time he was fairly well-known on the stage as a producer, playwright and director before he entered radio. Perhaps his main claim to fame in that medium was that in 1934, as director of the CBS educational series American School of the Air (1930-48), he hired a brash 19-year-old named Orson Welles for his first audio acting job.

   I know of only one reference to Entrikin’s work on the EQ series, an unpublished letter of 22 November 1942 from Manny to Fred, discussing the program’s most recent episode (“The Bald-Headed Ghost,” 19/21 November):

   I take it that the last words mean: Who will know you and I aren’t to blame?

   Entrikin seems to have remained with the EQ series from its return to the air in January 1942 until fourteen months later when Ruthrauff & Ryan assigned him to a project on the West Coast. He’s included here because, like Harry Stephen Keeler, he brushed against Fred Dannay and Manny Lee.

   Finally we come to another man, infinitely better known than Entrikin, who was thought to have brushed against Fred and Manny but actually didn’t. I refer to none other than John Wayne. During the WWII years the Queen radio series featured Hollywood personalities and some unknowns, many of them in the military, as guest armchair detectives.

   My book THE SOUND OF DETECTION: ELLERY QUEEN’S ADVENTURES IN RADIO (2002) included an episode-by-episode list of those guests, based on research in old studio files by Martin Grams, Jr. Much of what Marty found in those files consisted only of guests’ first initials and last names. For “The Fire Bug” (22/24 July 1943) and “The Fallen Gladiator” (16/18 September 1943) one of those guests was a certain J. Wayne.

   Knowing that the Duke didn’t serve in the war, both Marty and I—and before us John Dunning in the entry on the Queen series in ON THE AIR: THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF OLD TIME RADIO (Oxford University Press, 1998)— assumed that this was he. Later research revealed that “J.” was an ordinary Joe by the name of Jerry Wayne.

   All things considered, I still think the mistake we made was reasonable. But I do wonder how many readers of THE SOUND OF DETECTION racked their brains trying to imagine the Duke playing supersleuth. If any of them happen to read this column, my deepest apologies.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The D. A. Breaks a Seal. Doug Selby #7. William Morrow, hardcover, 1946. Previously serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in seven part between December 1, 1945, and January 12, 1946.  Pocket Book #869, paperback, 1952. Cardinal C-292, paperback, 1958.

   Thanks to HBO if not the long-running TV series in the 1950s and 60s, everyone in the know knows about famed defense attorney Perry Mason. Not so many have heard about Gardner’s series character who plied his trade on the other side of the aisle, Doug Selby, the District Attorney for Madison County, California, some small distance from the bright lights of L. A., Madison City being a small blip in the larger scheme of things.

   But to be honest, Selby is a major in the U. S. Army all through The D. A. Breaks a Seal. He’s on leave and heading for his next assignment when decides to hop off the train and see how the folks he left behind. Rex Brandon is still the sheriff, and Selby’s nemesis, defense attorney A. B. Carr is still making headlines, both in LA and in Madison City. There’s a new D.A in town, of course, but he’s having a tough time making people forget Doug Selby.

   The story begins with two people getting off the same train that Selby arrives on, standing out first by the simple fact they’re wearing white gardenias, then by A. B. Carr showing up and obviously seeking them out. Selby’s lady friend Sylvia Martin, a reporter, senses a story, and she’s right. Soon after, a man is found dead in a local hotel room under strange circumstances, and somehow A. B. Carr is involved in that, too – as well in a local legal case about a contested will.

   Lots of detective work ensues, unofficially by Selby, and courtroom drama as well, this time officially. The legal matters are, as always in Gardner’s work, supremely complicated, but he, as usual, makes me believe I know what’s going on all the way through.

   There’s even a hint of romance in the air – Sylvia is not the only woman in town who remembers Doug with fondness — and Gardner even takes the time to talk about what the country should be like after the war.

   There’s lots to like with this one.

THEODORE STURGEON. “Agnes, Accent and Access.” Short story. First published in Galaxy SF, October 1973. Reprinted in The Best from Galaxy, Volume II, edited anonymously by Ejler Jakobsson. Collected in Case and the Dreamer, Volume XIII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books, 2010).

   This is the second of three short stories in this issue of Galaxy that I’ve been reading, ignoring the two long serial installments by James White and Arthur C. Clarke that take up a full two-thirds of the magazine. As far as ISFDb knows, the story has appeared in only two other places, which seems strange to me, as it’s a good one.

   When a company who stock in trade is the information retrieval business, it seems strange that they have to hire an outside consultant when problems arrive internally: requests from departments of the firm are being replied to with very incorrect responses. His way of investigating: to sit outside the president’s office ostensibly waiting for an appointment but in reality watching the very efficient secretary, named Agnes, working at her desk throughout the day.

   This story was written in 1973, long before Siri and Alexa came along, but if science fiction could ever have been said to predict the future, and the describe the problems that come along with it, this is a story that fits the bill to perfection. Adding even more to the enjoyment of the tale is the fact that Theodore Sturgeon was a flows along.

   Examples. This one line sentence, a mere throwaway in fact, sums up a fact that you might not of thought of yourself, but once read, you say, “Of course.”

   Or how about this longer passage, describing only the office itself where the consultant is waiting and observing:

THE STEEL KEY. Eros Films, UK, 1953. Terence Morgan, Joan Rice, Raymond Lovell, Dianne Foster. Director: Robert S. Baker.

   International playboy and thief Johnny O’Flynn (Terence Morgan) tries to prevent criminals from stealing a secret formula for processing hardened steel, called the Steel Key, and discovers that one of the scientists involved has been murdered while another, Professor Newman (Esmond Knight) has died of apparently natural causes.

   His investigation leads him to a sanatorium, run by one Dr Crabtree (Colin Tapley), and a captured scientist forced to reproduce the formula. On the way, Johnny meets Newman’s glamorous, younger wife Sylvia (Dianne Foster) and rescues pretty nurse Doreen (Joan Rice), after the kidnappers try to kill her. Inspector Forsythe of Scotland Yard (Raymond Lovell) is also on the scent, but is intent on arresting Johnny for the crime.

   This British second-feature is a great deal of fun and one of my favourites from the era. It has much in common with other adventure-thrillers featuring a suave and witty hero. This may have been deliberate as it was originally intended to involve The Saint, but producers Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman could not secure the rights to the character. (They would eventually, of course, make a phenomenally successful television series with Roger Moore in the role.)

   Its Saintly beginnings, however, remain obvious to all as O’Flynn is considered to be a thief who claims a reward for any boodle he recovers and spars wryly with a portly inspector who would love to put him behind bars. It’s basically Simon and Inspector Teal, with all the hi-jinks that implies.

   With his chiselled features, slick dark hair and mischievous glint in his eye, actor Terrence Morgan makes for a likeable and charismatic hero as Johnny O’Flynn. Amid all the action, there are some good dollops of humour in here too. There is, of course, the constant cat-and-mouse game with the police, but there are also moments which border on farce (never a bad thing, in my book) as Johnny pretends to be one of the scientists involved with Newman. Indeed, nurse Doreen never discovers his real name and it is uttered only a handful of times in the whole film.

   The finger of accusation moves frequently from one suspect to another, but this a pacey adventure and not a drawing room whodunit, though the revelation does come as a surprise. The only criticism I would make is the inclusion of three scientists (one who is only referred to), which seems a bit messy to me.

   Morgan’s career started out promisingly with roles in Olivier’s Hamlet and Captain Horatio Hornblower with Gregory Peck, but he quickly slid into B-films and became typecast as villains, and though a switch to television with The Adventures of Francis Drake was successful, it did not last. Fortunately, there does not seem to have been an unhappy ending for Morgan, as he left acting to run a hotel on the South-East coast of England for many years before becoming a property developer. He died in 2005 at the age of 83.

Rating: *****