TWO O’CLOCK COURAGE. RKO Radio Pictures, 1945. Tom Conway, Ann Rutherford, Richard Lane, Lester Matthews, Roland Drew, Emory Parnell, Bettejane Greer, Jean Brooks. Based on the novel of the same title by Gelett Burgess. Previously filmed as Two in the Dark (1936). Director: Anthony Mann. Available on DVD and  streaming here on the Internet Archive.

   There are three good movies all wrapped up in this one and struggling to get out. Unfortunately with only just over 60 minutes of running time, not one of them manages to prevail. The result is a totally entertaining but still disappointing film that could have been so much better if the people behind this one had chosen one of the three and stuck to it.

(A) Noir. A man staggers out into a foggy street and a cab manages to stop from hitting him only in the nick of time. The driver of the cab, female, lends a sympathetic ear when she discovers that he is bleeding from a wound on his head, and cannot remember who he is or why he’s there on the street. I was reminded immediately of Cornell Woolrich and many of his stories at this point.

(B) Screwball comedy. Trying to discover who he is, the pair run across a murder, a dopey cop, a wise aleck reporter and a butler who didn’t do it. They also find themselves rubbing elbows with the high class elite of the city, all dressed up in night club finery, including the cab driver (Ann Rutherford, who never looked finer).

(C) A serious detective mystery, centered around the manuscript of a successful play, but the name on the manuscript is not the same as the person who’s taking credit for it. As far as I was concerned, here’s where I decided to sit back and simply enjoy the movie, since none of this made any sense.

   Quite a mishmash indeed, is what I’m trying to say. Tom Conway, as the amnesiac, which I see I have neglected to mention before, is perfect in his role: suitably bewildered but still obviously a gentleman of some refinement. I do see I have mentioned Ann Rutherford already. She is worth mentioning twice. And did you see Jane Greer in the credits? A small part, I grant you, but she’s just another reason for watching this one. An indubitable bonus, if you will.

MARK SABIN – Winchester Cut. Gold Medal #144, paperback, 1951. recycled as Stranger from Arizona: Dodd, Mead, hardcover, 1956, as by Norman A. Fox. Also Dell #969, paperback, 1958; and Avon, paperback, 1987.

   I’ll use any excuse to sample a Gold Medal, and the title of this one intrigued me, winking up from a neat pile of paperbacks in a used book store on the main drag of an old hippie town somewhere in Ohio. So I bought it, then a few weeks later I cracked it open and found:

   So I knew at least this guy loved to write. The ensuing pages filled out a book that’s nothing special, really, but a solid read.

   Clint Tracy arrives in Montana emotionally scarred by a Texas range war, battle hardened and ready for the heady ranchers’ feud he finds brewing. But he has his own agenda, and it has more to do with the people involved than with land or cattle. The characters turn out to be fairly standard types: tough old rancher, willful daughter, hot-headed son, etc. but the author writes them as if he’d just thought them up, and the result is they never seem as cliché’d as they really are.

   Sabin/Fox leans on the mystery of Tracy’s mission (which ain’t all that mysterious) a bit heavily at times, but he fills the story with enough riding, fighting and shooting to keep it lively, and when the range war finally erupts, it’s intelligently done. Nobody blunders for the sake of convenience, and Sabin/Fox’s lean prose carries the action very nicely indeed.

   Winchester Cut won’t get on anyone’s Ten Best List — Hell, it’ll never even make a Top100 — but it makes for an entertaining hour or so of the kind of fast-moving reading they just don’t seem to write anymore.

LIZA CODY – Dupe. PI Anna Lee #1. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1980. Scribner’s, US, hardcover, 1981. Warner, US, paperback, 1983; Bantam, US, paperback, 1992. TV adaptation: Season 1, Episode 1 of Anna Lee, 27 February 1994, with Imogen Stubbs as Anna Lee.

   To say that the biggest fault with Liza Cody’s first novel is that we don’t get to know private eye Anna Lee well enough is testimony to the attractiveness and likableness of her heroine. Anna is a former policewoman in her late twenties, employed by the London private inquiry firm Brierly Security. In a welcome relief from her usual assignments – hunting for missing minors or “scent-counter security” – Anna is assigned to dig into the past of an apparent fatal accident victim, Dierdre Jackson.

   Dierdre had been estranged from her parents for three years, and her mother wants to know if she was happy in those last years, while her father wants information because he suspects Dierdre’s car crash was no accident. Representing herself as a friend of the family, Anna traces Dierdre’s friends and employers, most or them on the fringes or the film world; and soon she, too, begins to suspect there is more to the young woman’s death than a crash on an icy road.

   Anna’s low-key approach to investigation is refreshing, and she proves herself tough enough when the case requires it. The glimpses we are allowed into Anna’s private life – especially those scenes involving her zany and endearing neighbors, Bea and Selwyn Price – are tantalizing. So much so, in fact, that any reader will want to know more about her background, such as what her family was like and why she joined and then left the police force.

   An engaging novel with a strong plot, Dupe won the John Creasey Award for Britain’s Best First Mystery Novel. Cody’s second and third novels, also featuring Anna Lee, are Bad Company (1982) and Stalker (1984).

———
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
   

      The complete Anna Lee series –

Dupe (n.) Collins 1980
Bad Company (n.) Collins 1982
Stalker (n.) Collins 1984
Head Case (n.) Collins 1985
Under Contract (n.) Collins 1986
Backhand (n.) Chatto 1991
Bucket Nut (n.) Chatto 1992 [with Eva Wylie]

RAYMOND J. HEALY & J. FRANCIS McCOMAS, Editors – Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time And Space. The Modern Library G-31; hardcover, 1957, xvi + 997 pages. First published as Adventures in Time in Space, Random House, hardcover, 1946. Bantam F3102, paperback, 1966, as Adventures in Time and Space (contains only 8 stories). Ballantine, paperback, 1975, also as Adventures in Time and Space.

   Part 1 can be found here.

P. SCHUYLER MILLER “The Sands of Time.” A pointless time-travel story, if that could be imagined, including a mysterious battle between unknown invaders of Earth sixty million years ago. (1)

Update: First published in Astounding Stories, April 1937. First reprinted in this anthology, then in Great Science Fiction Stories, edited Cordelia Titcomb Smith (Dell Laurel-Leaf Library, paperback, 1964) and Voyagers in Time, edited by Robert Silverberg (Meredith Press, hardcover, 1967), among others. After a moderately lengthy career writing science fiction, mostly between the 1930s and early 40s, Miller became the long-time reviewer of the field for Astounding/Analog SF from 1951 to 1975.

LEWIS PADGETT “The Proud Robot.” Novelette. Gallagher invents a robot while drunk, then forgets its purpose, but finally manages to use it to prevent a monopoly of the television industry. (3)

Update: Lewis Padgett was one of the pen names used by Henry Kuttner. Some of the stories published under this name were co-written by C. L. Moore, but I do not believe this was one. The “Gallagher” series, of which this is a prime example, were very popular. “The Proud Robot,” the third in the series, first appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction, October 1943, and was first reprinted in this anthology. First collected in Robots Have No Tails (Gnome Press, hardcover, 1952), then in Return to Otherness (Ballantine F619, paperback, 1962). Over the years it has appeared  in many other anthologies and collections of Kuttner’s works.

A. E. Van VOGT “Black Destroyer.” Novelette. An exploring spaceship discovers a planet now ruled by the killer coeurls, descendants of a once-powerful civilization. Most notable for the description of one of these alien creatures, the story loses some of its effectiveness with a confusing ending. (4)

Update: First appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1939. From Wikipedia: “‘Black Destroyer’ was combined with several other short stories to form the novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle (Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1950). It was claimed as an inspiration for the movie Alien and van Vogt collected an out-of-court settlement of $50,000 from 20th Century Fox.” A source quoted by Wikipedia suggests that this particular story “represents the start of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.”

TO BE CONTINUED.…

BLIND ADVENTURE (RKO, 1933) Robert Armstrong, Helen Mack, Roland Young, Ralph Bellamy, John Miljan, Tyrill Davis, and Phyllis Barry. Written by Ruth Rose. Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack.

   This one gets off to a slow start, especially for a movie only an hour long, but stick with it.

   Blind Adventure was cobbled together while stars Armstrong and Mack were lolling around on RKO’s dime, awaiting completion of the stop-motion effects in Son of Kong. And it has a charmingly thrown-together look, courtesy of Ruth Rose’s one-damn-thing-after-another story, and Ernest B Schoedsack’s rough-and ready direction.

   Things get moving when Robert Armstrong, an American at loose ends in London, gets lost in a foggy night, wanders into a stately town house to get directions, and finds it deserted — except for a dead body (Ralph Bellamy.) He catches a glimpse of someone running out of the house, loses him in the fog, and returns to find the house filled with staid, respectable Englishmen, no dead body in evidence, and everyone assuring him there’s no need to bother the Police.

   Enter delightful Helen Mack as a niece visiting staid, respectable relatives she’s never seen. She and Armstrong overhear the others arguing about what to do with them and start to sneak out… only to discover Ralph Bellamy, who it turns out was merely stunned by a bullet grazing his head.

   Bellamy explains that the house is full of spies, he’s with the Secret Service, and they must deliver a cigarette case to his boss — the fate of the Free World depends on it.

   Fortunately, the story that ensues is not nearly so simple-minded. Twist follows turn, complications compound, and mysteries mount with every scene.

   Chief among said complications is a cockney burglar, played to the hilt and then some by Roland Young, usually typed as pusillanimous businessmen, looking delighted with the change. The three principals forge their way through a plot as dense as the London fog that fills the screen, courtesy of Henry W. Gerrard’s evocative photography.

   But the real star of this thing is Ruth Rose’s story and her director-husband’s gift for telling it with verve and a certain amount of affection. The critical world will little note nor long remember Blind Adventure, but it offers a pleasant hour of adventure that I shall cherish.
   

THE NIGHT STALKER “The Zombie.” ABC, 20 September 1974 (Season 1, Episode 2). 60m. Darren McGavin (Carl Kolchak), Simon Oakland (Tony Vincenzo). Created by Jeff Rice. Teleplay: Zekial Marko and David Chase. Director: Alex Grasshoff.

    There’s a lot of fun to be had in “The Zombie.” The second episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, “The Zombie” combines chills and frights with off-beat humor and further establishes the template for the series as a whole.

    Here, intrepid reporter/supernatural investigator Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) uncovers an occult connection to an ongoing mob war. As it turns out, one of the men recently killed by the Chicago mob was a Haitian man whose aunt dabbled in voodoo. So, it comes as no surprise to Kolchak that the culprit behind the revenge killings of mob members was not a living and breathing human after all; it was – you guessed it – a zombie. The very man long thought dead.

    Aired at a time when blaxploitation was all the rage, the episode showcases the rivalry and partnership between Chicago’s Italian and Black gangs. Portraying one of the Black gang members is no other than Antonio Fargas, who would later become widely known to television audiences as restaurant owner and informant Huggy Bear on Starsky & Hutch. Also look for character actor and comedian J. Pat O’Malley, who I remember from a particularly poignant episode of Three’s Company, as an undertaker whose main concern seems to be whether his union will approve of what’s transpiring all around him.

    There’s an amusingly effective subplot involving Kolchak and his editor Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland). Turns out Vincenzo wants Kolchak to show a head honcho’s niece from New York the ropes of journalism. Little does she know that it will involve seeing the mangled corpses of mob enforcers lying in the street. You can stream the full episode here.

(1) Per Fine Ounce by Peter Vollmer. Lume Books, paperback, 2020. Also available as a Kindle edition. Based on an unpublished James Bond novel by Geoffrey Jenkins.

(2) The Killing Zone by Jim Hatfield. Charter Books, paperback, 1985.

   What these two books have in common, other than a certain rarity, is that both are unofficial James Bond pastiches not fully approved by the Ian Fleming estate, and among the more interesting ephemera related to that ongoing phenomena that is James Bond 007.

   First we have Per Fine Ounce, which is based on an unpublished authorized James Bond novel by South African author Geoffrey Jenkins.

   Following the death of Ian Fleming and the publication of Fleming’s last completed novel The Man With the Golden Gun, Jenkins, author of Grue of Ice, and River of Diamonds, was approached in 1966 to write a James Bond novel suggested by Fleming’s own plans to write another Bond set in South Africa (Diamonds Are Forever opens and closes in South Africa and Fleming also wrote the non-fiction The Diamond Smugglers).

   Instead the Kingsley Amis Colonel Sun as by Robert Markham was the first Bond pastiche.

   The book was written by Jenkins, rejected with no reason given (I suspect the complex politics of a book set in South Africa under Apartheid scared off the Fleming estate as much as anything), and thought lost. Eventually it was discovered the manuscript still existed, but the Fleming estate had no interest in it being published.

   This is the point when Peter Vollmer, a South African writer in the Wilbur Smith tradition, approached Jenkins’ son with the idea of writing a version of the original novel featuring not James Bond, but a version of Jenkins’ own series character, Geoffrey Peace (Twist of Sand, Hunter Killer).

   That said, the Geoffrey Peace in this book has almost nothing to do with the character in Jenkins’ books. This is very much a Bond imitation in all ways and sadly a pretty pale one at that. It’s the failure of Peace to evolve into anything more than a mediocre Bond or Peace imitation that is the biggest problem. He is, to paraphrase Fleming, neither six of one or a half dozen of the other.

   That and some bizarre choices like having Peace go on about y-front underwear like Matt Helm on women in pants don’t help. Peace whining about y-fronts is not Bond’s shaken not stirred or preference for sleeveless blue Sea Island cotton shirts.

   I’m not sure what Vollmer thought he was doing there.

   Vollmer has written some fine books on his own, but despite his claims of enthusiasm, there isn’t much here. England, eager to keep its close ties to South Africa secret, sends Peace on a mission summed up pretty well in the second chapter.

   A good enough set up, and I don’t want to mislead, the book is not bad, it just isn’t worth all the buildup and wait.

   Peace is neither James Bond nor the much darker Jenkins character, and the result is a rather wan sixties style spy thriller that at its best is not up to many of the better contemporary Bond imitations (James Leasor, Andrew York, Philip McCutchan, George B. Mair, and James Mayo all did it better and certainly Amis, John Gardner, Anthony Horowitz, and Raymond Benson did it better).

   The stolen bullion leads to a more complicated plot about South Africa and Israel collaborating on a nuclear bomb, and both extreme right and left factors involved in the plot with a megalomaniac named Van Rhym involved in seizing the South African gold reserves and embroiling the whole continent in nuclear conflagration.

   There is also a heroine named Cherry Boxx.

   Sigh.

   Probably no book could ever come up to the expectation of a lost novel by a popular writer lost since 1966, so Vollmer deserves credit for a thankless task done as well as it probably could have been done.

   That said, and despite some good action, the whole thing doesn’t add up to much.

   If Per Fine Ounce doesn’t add up to much, it as least makes sense. Just how The Killing Joke ever got published without being shut down by the Fleming estate is a mystery.

   The Killing Joke was published as a paperback original in the United States in the 1980’s. It is copyrighted by both Hatfield and the Fleming estate, but how it was written and published and why are both mysteries.

   The inside copy explains the plot better than I could:

   Just in passing, the ninja is named Chen.

   Just saying.

   We open with James Bond’s longtime friend and M’s second in command Bill Tanner being murdered in Mexico. James Bond we discover is retired and living in Jamaica.

   … the elite Double-0 section – which meant being licensed to kill in the line of duty – was being abolished… So Commander James Bond, Agent 007 of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, resigned and relocated to the Caribbean.

   Of course Bond comes out of retirement at M’s behest to avenge his friend and is drawn into a bloody and violent saga. The book isn’t bad. It is no way Fleming or the least Flemingesque, but it is a decent sub-Bondian spy novel with someone called James Bond who at times almost seems to be Bond without Fleming’s sophistication and wit (sorely missing in the Vollmer book too).

   And then … SPOILER ALERT!

   James Bond dies.

   Dead.

   No resurrection, no trick.

   Bond is dead.

   And the Fleming estate somehow is fine with it, or at least didn’t drag the author and publisher into court.

   This one is a bit harder to find than Per Fine Ounce, but there is a free PDF you can download if you search for it and want to read it and not overpay for the hard to find paperback.

   The Killing Zone remains a mystery to me. Just how Hatfield came to write it, much less got it published is an enigma. Just what anyone involved was thinking is mystery enough. Neither book comes anywhere near being even remotely like Fleming (or Jenkins), and yet either is a decent read on its own if nothing special.

   But even by the standards of pastiche these two are oddities. I suppose the only real response to either of them is surprise they exist.

   I won’t even go into the Donald Westlake James Bond novel published a year or two ago revised without Bond. That one at least makes sense.

JAMES H. COBB “The Sound of Justice.” Kevin Pulaski #2. Novelette. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 2005. Probably never reprinted.

   The Kevin Pulaski of the present is a retired veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, but when he was in high school, back in Indiana in 1949, that he would grow up to be a lawman was the furthest thing from his mind. He was, in fact, a hod-rodder of the first magnitude, and a JD? His reply, “Man, I was there when they first came out.”

   That he had an off-and-on relationship with the local authorities at the time doesn’t matter when a good buddy is accused of stealing a small fortune of jewelry from his girl friend’s father’s store. Kevin goes the preliminary trial on his own initiative, and part of the evidence he provides is… Well, this small excerpt should explain:

   â€œI […turned] to face the judge’s desk. “I’m what you call establishing precedent. You see, Your Honor, every hot rod ever built has a kind of fingerprint. Something about it that is totally different from any other car in the world, the sound of its engine.”

   He demonstrates and his friend goes free. The story is cleanly told and not once pretentious. Even though I was never part of the hot rod culture in high school, I was fully aware of it, and I enjoyed this brief trip back in time.
   

      The Kevin Pulaski series —

Road Bomb (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar/Apr 2004
The Sound of Justice (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine July 2005
Framed (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine June 2006
Over the Edge (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine July 2007
Body and Fender (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine August 2008
Desert and Swamp (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar/Apr 2009

   and previously:

West on 66. Minotaur, hardcover, October 1999, and taking place in Pulaski’s days as a LA lawman.

RICHARD LAYMAN & JULIE RIVETT, Editors – Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett. Counterpoint, hardcover, 2001; paperback, 2002.

   Speaking of Dashiell Hammett, he came a cropper again more recently, this time a victim of the Bloated Times we live in. With Adventure Books coming out at over 400 pages, movies routinely over two-and-a-half-hours long, and Comic Books that take a whole year to tell a story, I guess it had to happen to even the champion of lean, terse writing, and the latest evidence of this mindless pursuit of Bigness is Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, “edited” – and I use the word contemptuously — by Richard Layman and Julie Rivett.

   A few numbers back, I praised Raymond Chandler Speaking, and the virtues of that compact little gem shine all the more brightly next to the sullen morass of Selected/Hammett. Layman and Rivett seem totally incapable of winnowing the Meaningful from the trivia that constitutes most correspondence, and as a result we get over 600 pages (!) of Who went to what party, How much Life Insurance should we buy, Will the Heat Spell ever break, and — Oh God I can’t go on with it.

   The reader who wades through this swamp must combine a fanatical devotion to Hammett with a total lack of discrimination and the patience of Sisyphus. Stay away.

GENE THOMPSON – Murder Mystery. Dade Cooley #1. Random House, hardcover, 1980. Ballantine, paperback, 1981.

   You have to agree – it’s a great title for a detective story. And for that it’s such an obvious one, would you believe that a quick check in Hubin’s Bibliography of Crime Fiction would show that it’s the first time it’s ever been used?

   That, plus the simple elegance of the cover – white on black with a small insert showing the front of a shiny Rolls Royce, splattered with blood – would suggest a reading treat of a highly elite nature about to unfold before us. The story. however, is a disappointment. It just doesn’t measure up to our expectations. (Well, it didn’t mine.)

   It tries. While obviously there are very few mean streets in Malibu, we are nearly persuaded that what lies behind the doors of some southern California mansions may be insidiously meaner. Doing the honors as the detective in the case is society lawyer Dade Cooley, who is persuaded by the daughter of a client that her mother’s fatal accident with her car was in truth no accident at all.

   Well, of course it wasn’t. And by actual count, at one point the list of possible suspects has reached at least twelve. This is a lot of people to keep close tabs on, and fear I lost track of some of them from time to time.

   The plot is complex, confusing, and slow-moving. It hinges at length on a bit of precarious time-tabling that does manage to get the murderer and the victim together at the same time, but that is all it does.

   As a detective, Cooley is literate and intelligent enough for the job, but he seems far too fond of himself and his wit for me to think of him as likable. Thompson may or may not be making him into a series character – this is apparently his first murder mystery – but if he is, I’m afraid he’s off to a toe-stubbing start.

Rating: C minus
   

POSTSCRIPT: There is something else that troubles me about this book, and maybe I should mention it. One of Thompson’s other characters, not Cooley, is said to have been a poet, and a few of his lines are quoted to prove it. I have no quarrel at all with that, of course, but at the end of the book Thompson reveals in a brief acknowledgment that the work in question actually came from the pen of real-life poet Gerard Hanley Hopkins. Even if it was reprinted with permission, I don’t know about you, but I’m inclined to think that if this is meant to be some sort of new literary technique, it’s one we can do without just as quickly.

The Dade Cooley series —

Murder Mystery. Random House 1980.
Nobody Cared for Kate. Random House 1983.
A Cup of Death. Random House 1988

UPDATE: I wasn’t able to do this then, long before Google was even conceived of, but this is now, and what I’ve been able to discover is that Gene Thompson was a fairly prolific writer for quite a number of television series. A few that you may have heard of are: Bob Newhart, Here’s Lucy, Harry O, Ellery Queen, Cannon, Quincy, and Columbo. (This list is far from complete.)