>> I almost hated to tell Bill that I paid either a dollar for the copy of Final Payment that I found, plus shipping — or was it a pound, since I bought it on eBay from a seller in England — but sometimes collectors tell each other stories like that. As I did so, I asked him about his overall interests in Major Books, and I guess he’s still talking to me, since he replied:

>> Just in case you were wondering: I collect the Gothics and westerns from Major Books too. That makes at least three of us, since my good friend Dan Roberts collects everything that Major Books published, the straight romances and the non-fiction as well. (To the people we meet in the ordinary world, the three of us look as normal as anyone else.)

    “I’m seeking information on novelist Arthur Rees (Australian born 1872 (ish ), died 1942). Spent (perhaps much) time in England and wrote novels showing detailed knowledge of and interest in his adoptive home. His ‘detective/horror’ work includes The Shrieking Pit set in Norfolk and the tiny port of Blakeney.

    “The book is prefaced by reference to Annie and Frances – my sisters in Australia, and a lengthy poem (of merit) about Blakeney.

    “Any biographical information would be very much appreciated. Many thanks.”

         —

   As always, when asked about an author new to me, I turn first to Allen J. Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, wherein is found:

   This listing includes the British editions only. A handful of the titles were published in the US, often with title changes; CFIV also lists one US title which has not yet been matched with an UK equivalent. Books in which a setting is indicated (most of them) take place in either England or Wales.

   After consulting CFIV, as usual I sent out the usual cry for assistance, which was quick in arriving. From John Herrington came the bulk of the incoming information:

   Then from Al Hubin:

   Heading back to do some Googling on my own, I came up with the following book descriptions from the Supernatural Fiction Data Base (which I did not know existed before):

The Shrieking Pit, 1919

   Not, strictly speaking, a supernatural title. The locale that gives the book its title has a supernatural legend attached to it that is mentioned in passing, but there are no supernatural incidents in the story.    (**)

The Threshold of Fear, 1925

   A novel with borderline supernatural content: its villain has occult powers of mind control.

** As part of the introductory material for this book is the following: “As the scenes of this story are laid in a part of Norfolk which will be readily identified by many Norfolk people, it is perhaps well to state that all the personages are fictitious, and that the Norfolk police officials who appear in the book have no existence outside these pages. They and the other characters are drawn entirely from imagination.”

   As John mentioned, four of Arthur Rees’s mysteries are available as free etexts. I’ve provided links to these in the entry from CFIV. If you (like me) dislike reading novels for entertainment from a computer screen, you can always download them as text files, then print them out. All it will cost you is the paper. And a new printer cartridge, I hasten to add, but still a bargain.

   Speaking of mystery movies, as I was not too long ago, Turner Classic Movies is having a special on them this month — a total of no fewer than 53 of them are going to be shown on Tuesdays and Wednesdays during the month of March. Make sure your Tivo’s and (if need be) old-tech VCR’s are ready for these:

   That adds up to 53, doesn’t it? I don’t know if I’ll be taping all of the above, but some of these are absolute musts.

   Al admits to being 71 years young today. Happy Birthday, Al!

   Prompted by a review by Ed Gorman of one of his early private eye stories for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, author James Reasoner recently did some reminiscing on his own blog about the private eye characters he created back then, some 25 to 30 years ago.

   There were four “Markham” stories, he says, calling Markham “sort of a dry run for my private eye character Cody, who appeared in the novel Texas Wind and several short stories of his own.”

   James goes on to say that Markham “was the second private eye character I created for MSMM. The first was called Delaney … who appeared in a handful of short, very minor stories. Cody came along after Markham and I used both of them in stories for a while, but Cody last appeared in 1988, nearly twenty years ago.”

   If you hadn’t missed it, yes, all three detectives have only a single name.

   It’s a long post, and besides talking about his own characters, James also discusses the other authors who appeared in some of the same issues of MSMM as he did, writers such as Joe R. Lansdale, Edward D. Hoch, William L. Fieldhouse and others. Not only that, but he remembers the pair of editors who bought the stories as well: Sam Merwin, Jr., and Charles E. Fritch.

   I’ll have to dig out some of the back issues of MSMM I have in my own collection. James also did many of the “Mike Shayne” short novels or novelettes that appeared in every issue during this same era, including the one pictured here.

   It made the magazine one of the few places where you could be guaranteed being able to read a PI story anytime you picked one up. (The link above will take you to a list of many of the Mike Shayne stories that appeared in the magazine and who wrote them.)

   James concludes by saying, “I’ve thought at times that a volume collecting all the Cody, Markham, and Delaney stories would make a nice little book. Maybe one of these days.”

   If at all possible, make it sooner rather than later, James.

[UPDATE] 03-06-07. At the request of myself and a number of others, James has posted a complete list of all of his non- “Mike Shayne” private eye short fiction.

   He goes on to talk about a few of the stories, including some additional details about his various PI characters. James concludes by saying:

[UPDATE] 09-08-08. It’s a little late to be considered breaking news, but a collection of 17 of James’s 18 private eye stories was published earlier this year by Ramble House. The title is For Old Times’ Sake, and you can order it here.

DAVID HUME – Requiem for Rogues

Collins, UK, hc, 1942. Reprints: 1946?, 1952. Collins White Circle #380, Canada, pb, 1949.

   The author, first of all, is NOT David Hume (April 26, 1711 – August 25, 1776), who was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian, and according to at least one source, one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and of the Scottish Enlightenment.

   Nor is it his real name, for which see below. One does idly wonder why Mr. Turner chose it as a working by-line, though. It also makes it difficult to come up with information about him on Google, most of the searches picking up the wrong man, obviously.

   On one website, I did come across the following, however:

   From Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, which of course I turned to next, if not first, comes the following list of titles by Mr. Hume. These are the British editions only:

   I don’t know about you but these are all new names to me, both that of the author (and his pen names) and his characters. Back to Google, it seems. Here’s a snippet of a review from The Bookman, 1933, of the US Holt edition of Nicolas Brady’s The House of Strange Guests:

   Another snippet of a review, this one from The Librarian and Book World, date?, of Brady’s The Fair Murder:

   Seeing a few shorter works of fiction collected under David Hume’s byline, I checked out the online Fictionmags Index, with the following results. [* = included in CFIV list above, either as a novel serialized earlier in magazine form, or as a story collected later in book form]

   More googling, this time on Hume’s detective Mick Cardy. At this point I still knew nothing about him. On a website devoted to Inspector Maigret I discovered the following piece of art:

  1.   2.      3.      4.     5.   6.     7.       8.

   Maigret is the second gentleman on the left. Although they don’t have the original art, this cartoon came from the Storm-P museum in Copenhagen, and the curator, Jens Bing, identifies it as first appearing on the cover of the Danish pulp crime magazine Stjernehæftet in 1946. Bing sent a a copy to the Danish branch of the Sherlock Holmes Society, and here are the results they came up with for the others in the scene:

   I don’t think I would gotten many of those, assuming that these are the right answers. How would you have done? But no matter, it would seem that Mick Cardby was actually Inspector Cardby, but this is not so, as we shall see in a minute. I didn’t include them in the CFIV listings, but two of Hume’s books were indicated as being the sources of films based upon them. So off I went to www.imdb.com, where I found the following useful information:

   Plot summary for The Patient Vanishes (1941) aka They Called Him Death [The latter being the title of a 1934 book by Hume.]

   Aha. Mick Cardby is a PI, not a gent from the Yard at all. We’ve learned something. (And you who knew already can stop the knowing looks at each other.) One more movie from the IMDB:

   Too Dangerous to Live (1939) aka Crime Unlimited. [The latter being the David Hume title from 1933.] With Edward Lexy as Inspector Cardby, but no Mick Cardy listed in the credits, and no synopsis of the story.

   But from the All Movie Guide comes the following Plot Description:

   And from BFI, apparently there is a PI involved, after all:

   I am sure that if you were to find a copy to watch, all of this confusion may be very easily straightened out. But a question remains: Who was the more important of the two characters, Inspector Cardby or his son Mick? Should both of them be included in CFIV as significant Series Characters?

   And as you can easily see, Hume under his many aliases was extremely prolific. I’m sure you thought the same thing when you read through that list of mysteries up above. Could anyone who wrote so many detective novels so quickly be any good at it? Hold that thought. We’ll get back to it in a minute.

   Hume also died young, at only 45. Could war injuries have had anything to do with his death? Having no answers, only these questions and more, unless you can enlighten me, I’ll move on to the major business at hand, which is a review of Requiem for Rogues.

    In which the leading character in is neither Cardy, father or son, but rather Tony Carter, a wisecracking crime reporter who appeared in three of Hume’s adventures, of which this is the third. He’s rather full of himself as well, as one might put it. Here’s a piece of a conversation that takes place on page 22 between Carter and his immediate superior at the Echo:

   Suffice it say that Carter convinces Cartwright to give him a free hand in this case of the drive-by killing of one Percival East, dead by means of a bullet between the eyes on page eight, and right before the eyes of a later berated Detective Spriggs.

   By page 69, the police are confused enough – and well they should be – to give Carter a free hand as well, as the case is seemingly awash with far too many clues and then again, far too few. But the more Carter digs into the case, the more deeply Percival East is discovered to have roots in the world of crime: the rackets, blackmail, the works.

   Incidentally, totally relevant to nothing, I don’t know why everyone in this book refers to members of the police force as “splits.” It’s a new one on me, but the rest of the slang I managed to decipher with no particular difficulty. Conversations, though, which should have taken a page at the most to start and end invariably took four or five, which means that Hume was either a master of dialogue or he needed these long dialogues to fill the novel to a proper length. As for myself, I will not say padding, as I found these conversations to be rather imaginative, at the least.

   There is no detection in this mystery novel, per se. Carter runs around London a lot, meets with his crew of regular informers a lot, and in so doing irritates the killer a lot, and enough so to make him (or her) make moves and counterattacks he (or she) really shouldn’t have done. If Carter had only been left alone, one might think, the case would never have been solved. One might very easily be right.

   This probably also answers the question I asked up above but didn’t answer until now.

HAVING WONDERFUL CRIME. RKO, 1945. Patrick O’Brien, George Murphy, Carole Landis, George Zucco. Co-screenwriter: Stewart Sterling; directed by A. Edward Sutherland.

   Based on the novel of the same name by Craig Rice, which I haven’t read, but all the sources which I have read say that the movie is nothing at all like the book. Murphy and Landis play the newly wed Jake and Helene Justus, while O’Brien is their long-suffering buddy in crime-solving, lawyer Michael J. Malone. (It was John J. Malone in the books. That much I do know.)

   The story has something to do with a magician who disappears in the middle of his stage act, then reappears in a trunk brought to a lakeside resort by his female assistant – or does he? In spite of the trio’s suspicions, he’s not in the trunk, but not to worry – he eventually turns up dead and there really is a case to be solved.

   I couldn’t tell you one way or another if the plot (the motive and where the body is when) makes any sense, and truthfully I don’t think that anyone involved in this madcap sort of affair, near slapstick at times, really cared.

   Pat O’Brien doesn’t nearly match the image of Malone I have in my head – for some reason, I see him as a shorter, more somber sort of fellow – but George Murphy is right on as Jake Justus, and Carole Landis is even more perfect as Helene. Her beautiful, smiling face, her lithesome figure and (as Helene) her slightly scatterbrained approach to life and solving murder mysteries, makes me wonder why her career in the movies never went any further than it did. (Due to illness, among other factors, she committed suicide only three years after this movie was released.)

   Even though from a murder mystery point of view there is much to be desired from this particular film, the performances of the three main characters make this a must-see, especially to watch Miss Landis in such high form, high spirits and in high fashion.

THE GREAT FLAMARION. Republic, 1945. Erich von Stroheim, Mary Beth Hughes, Dan Duryea, Stephen Barclay. Directed by Anthony Mann.

   A curiously flat film noir with oft-time director Erich von Stroheim as Flamarian, a vaudevillian headliner who falls for the wiles of femme fatale Mary Beth Hughes, an assistant in his pistol markmanship act. Her husband, Dan Duryea, is the other assistant in the act, a man driven to jealousy and as a consequence, given heavily to drink.

   Flamarion is a stolid, impassive, lonely man, once thrown over in love by a double-crossing woman, who’s vowed to never allow it to happen again. Contemptuous, however, of the weakness he sees in Al Wallace and tempted by the flirtatious Connie Wallace, he at length lets his guard down, to his own disaster – and as it happens, to the others in this ill-fated triangle.

The long scene during which Flamarion waits for Connie in a hotel bridal suite in buoyant anticipation, only to realize the inevitable, is as painful to watch as anything I’ve seen in a film in some time. Duryea is perfectly cast in his role, slickly conniving yet weak-kneed and a somewhat pitiful excuse for a man – a fact that the viewer is quickly made aware of. It’s a part made just for him.

   I don’t believe I’ve seen Mary Beth Hughes in a movie before, although she was around throughout the 1940s in B-movies like this, though often in uncredited performances. Her body language in the role was as crucial as her spoken dialogue, and she made the best of both.

   But the reason I called the film flat? The main story is presented in the form of a long, uncomplicated flashback. When you know the fate of two of the characters from the beginning, and you can soon guess that of the third, it’s just about impossible for any movie or any director or any cast to generate a feeling of suspense, and The Great Flamarion is no exception.

   On the other hand, if it had been filmed linearly, which would have been the only alternative, there simply aren’t enough twists and turns in the plot for the otherwise lightweight tale to have gone anywhere at all. Mann made the best of two choices, in my opinion, but in spite of some more better than average performances from the players, the movie didn’t ring any bells for me.

ROAR OF THE PRESS. Monogram, 1941. Wallace Ford, Jean Parker, Jed Prouty, Paul Fix. Directed by Phil Rosen.

   What this Grade B murder mystery movie is more than it is a murder mystery is a comedy about crime beat newspapermen and their wives who never see them. Wallace Ford is the reporter (Wally Williams) who spots a body falling from the top of a Manhattan skyscraper on the day and his bride of one day come to the city to spend a few days honeymooning. Jean Parker, of Detective Kitty O’Day fame (in certain circles), is his bride Alice, who hails from a small town in New England and who quickly joins the club – that of the long-suffering wives of the other reporters on her husband’s newspaper.

   Dead is the head of a pacifist league, in case it matters, and it doesn’t much, which turns out to be a front for fifth columnists and saboteurs. When Wally finds yet another body before the cops do, the cops get sore, and rightfully so, as all of the clues are in the pockets of Wally. Jed Prouty plays Wally’s editor, who cleverly keeps him on the case, even with the lure of a dinner of corned beef and cabbage waiting for him at home. One would think that the slim and decidedly pretty Mrs. Williams would be lure enough, but not so.

   Paul Fix is the head of a numbers racket with a heart of gold, and thereby saves the bacon of both Mr. and Mrs. Williams when the gang of bad guys start to get overly worried about what Wally knows, which truthfully is very little, even with the clues he obtained before the police did.

   As for director Phil Rosen, who later directed a number of Charlie Chan films, he makes the best of also truthfully very little, and the result is surprisingly entertaining.