THE NUMBER 23. New Line Cinema, 2007. Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen, Logan Lerman, Danny Huston, Lynn Collins. Screenwriter: Fernley Phillips. Director: Joel Schumacher.

   What this is, when you get down to it, with the dirt ground in deep beneath your fingernails, is a movie about obsessive numerology:

   You get the idea? There’s more:

    “Parents each contribute 23 chromosomes to their kids; the Earth’s axis is off by 23.5 degrees (and 5 = 2 + 3); the Mayans predicted the apocalypse on December 23, 2012 (20 + 1 + 2 = 23).”

   And still more:

   You see what I mean?

   Who’s Walter?, you ask. He’s Walter Sparrow, the obsessive, semi-nerdy protagonist of The Number 23, an animal control specialist, happily married (Virginia Madsen), with one well-adjusted son (Logan Lerman). Things are fine until his birthday (see above). A loose dog named Ned (see above) keeps Walter from meeting his wife on time. Loitering in a bookstore, she comes across a hand-produced book titled The Number 23, by Topsy Kretts, and she buys it for Walter as a gift.

   That’s when things go bad. Very bad. Walter begins to identify more and more with the protagonist in the book, a homicide detective named Fingerling. Noirish nightmares follow. A entire world filled with doppelgängers. A world filled with noir symbolism: rainy streets, saxophones playing in the background, beautiful suicidal blondes, knives, blood, death. A world of paranoia. Who do you trust? Are the dreams real?

   Many reviewers seem to have thought that since Jim Carrey is the star of The Number 23, that the movie is a comedy. They are wrong. Since they, the reviewers, didn’t laugh, except to ridicule, they decided that this is a black comedy. They are wrong.

   This is, believe it or not, a straightforward detective movie, and it is up to Walter Sparrow to determine, first of all, who died, and when, and then, finally, who did it. The story doesn’t get there in straight-forward fashion, though, and I admit it’s easy to lose track of what’s happening. (Some people who’ve left comments on IMBD were so totally confused after 20 minutes that they simply stopped watching. Why they want others to know this, I do not know.)

   This movie is a visual treat for the eyes, if you don’t mind skrunge, if you don’t mind madness occurring right in front of you, if you go with the movie instead of fighting it.

   I do wish, though, that the makers of this movie had chosen another ending. This one’s flat. It took a lot of work to build up to a suitable climax, but this one isn’t it.

   The mystery’s solved, the culprit’s named, but the sudden swoosh of air out of your lungs is less a release of tension than one of disappointment.

   Not that the ending isn’t the one the movie was pointing to all along. It’s not that. It’s that it could have – should have – been more. Not happier, not sadder, just one with a little more edge to it. That’s all I’d ask. (I’ve read that the DVD contains an alternative ending, but so far I’ve not been able to confirm that.)

      ______

    Please note: ● Friday’s the 6th day of the week, January’s the first month of the year, and this is the 16th. 6 + 1 + 16 = 23. ● If you were to copy this review into WordPerfect, the images would each appear as three words: The Number 23. There are 23 paragraphs in this review. ● There are 828 words: [2 + 3] + [8 + 2 + 8] = 23.

KENN DAVIS & JOHN STANLEY – The Dark Side.

Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, December 1976.

   As the cover so proudly proclaims, “Faster than Sherlock Holmes. Higher than Superfly. Handsomer than Inspector Poirot. It’s CARVER BASCOMBE and his first adventure.”

   Blurb writers sometimes lie, but this time it’s only a slight exaggeration. Even according to the authors on page 30, Bascombe is a combination of Superfly, Shaft and Virgil Tibbs, all rolled into one.

   It’s remarkable, though, isn’t it, what a difference of 15 years makes. Superfly is totally forgotten, Shaft nearly so, and if it weren’t for the TV series, Virgil Tibbs might very well be also.

   Bascombe is black and a PI, as you might have gathered, and Kenn Davis (by himself) is still writing about his adventures. I’ve read only a couple of them, but until I read The Dark Side I don’t think I realized how closely his cases are connected with the world of the arts.

   I’d have to look into it some more to be sure, but this one, at least, concerns a famous artist whose high-priced works seem to keep on selling, year after year, even though the experts see nothing to them. It also concerns a small teen-aged boy who thinks he’s found a way to make his family financially independent, but who ends up dead instead.

   By the way, I think (as was the case in the case of both Superfly and Shaft) that this book was originally written with an eye toward the movies. It never worked out, but the flair toward to the cinematic, in terms of both descriptive place-settings and the scenes of intense action, simply can’t be mistaken.

   And there is a great deal of violence involved. Even the title this one refers in passing to the great contrast that’s deliberately invoked between the gore of the action and the daintier world of the arts, as previously mentioned.

   Bascombe has white girl friend in this one, and she (Gwen Norris) is an unknowing cause of friction between Carver and a black cop named Ludlow. I don’t know if either one or both happen to appear in later adventures, but never mind. Even if Carver Bascombe has never became world famous in the meantime, he and his associated cast of characters certainly had a slam-bang opening case on their hands in this one.

[UPDATE] 01-16-09.   A long article on Kenn Davis appeared earlier here on the blog, and it includes a complete listing of all his books and a lot more about his life. I was right in surmising that The Dark Side was written with the movies in mind, and I was also correct in saying that Bascombe’s cases all had connection with the world of the arts.

   I did not remember that The Dark Side was nominated for an Edgar in 1976 as Best Paperback Original, until I went back myself to read that earlier piece on Kenn Davis. It’s always nice to know when your judgment is validated like that.

HONEYMOON ACADEMY. 1990. Kim Cattrall, Robert Hays, Leigh Taylor-Young, Jonathan Banks, Christopher Lee, Doris Roberts, Gordon Jump. Director: Gene Quintano.

   What do you do when you want to do Romancing the Stone and Kathleen Turner runs too high for your budget? Kim Cattrall is as exact a look-alike as you can get, without quite the same underlying seductiveness. A little too wholesome. I guess for underlying seductiveness you pay extra.

   Robert Hays is the man she marries. Unknown to him, his new bride is actually a member of a super secret government agency, a courier service of the State Department, so to speak.

   They do all kinds of deliveries: blackmail, ransom, that kind of thing. They meet, she quits, and on their honeymoon she is asked to perform one last, small task.

   We’ve read or seen that before, haven’t we? In this case: a small matter of counterfeit plates. There are a few funny scenes, but most of them border on the silly.

   But then, I laugh at almost anything.

[UPDATE] 01-15-09. Speaking of Kim Cattrall, as I was at the beginning of this review, I suppose some of you saw her in that HBO series she was recently in. I haven’t had the opportunity, I regret to say. What I have found, though, is a trailer for Honeymoon Academy, which you can access for yourself by following this link.

   After watching these small snapshots and snippets of the film, I still think she looks like Kathleen Turner. And I also think my review covers everything else you’ll see in these previews. Certainly nothing less.

ELAINE VIETS – Murder with Reservations.

New American Library, hardcover, May 2007; paperback reprint: Signet, May 2008. “A Dead-End Job Mystery.”

   Things really heat up in this latest Helen Hawthorne novel. The menial job worker’s ex-husband has tracked her to Florida, and she’s working at the Full Moon Hotel where Rhonda, one of her co-workers, is found dead in a dumpster.

   The subsequent publicity and increasing proximity of her ex-husband leaving Helen uncertain about which way to run.

   I’ve heard that Viets had a stroke in March ’07, but later information suggests that she’s recovering. I wish her well and look forward to the continuation of this funny, suspenseful series.

LYN HAMILTON – The Chinese Alchemist.

Berkley Prime Crime, hardcover, April 2007; paperback reprint: January 2008.

   To fulfill a promise to a friend, Hamilton’s Toronto antiques dealer sleuth Lara McClintoch travels to China to buy at auction a Tang Dynasty silver box, one of three that will complete a rare and very valuable set. The visit results in theft, murder and the usual exotic perils for indefatigable traveler Lara.

   Unfortunately, the plot bogs down in a protracted resolution that has more tell than show. This is not one of her more successful outings, with her research and fascination with historical background failing to blend seamlessly into the narrative.

[EDITORIAL UPDATE.]   The next book in Elaine Viets’ well-liked “Dead-End Job” series came out last year in May, right on schedule: Clubbed to Death (NAL, hardcover). In this adventure Helen Hawthorne becomes a “customer care” clerk at the snobbish Superior Club in Golden Palms, Florida.

   In all likelihood the book was finished before Viets had the stroke that Walter mentioned. Even better news, then, is that in June 2008, according to this online article, she was well enough to be doing a signing tour for the book.

   An interview with Elaine Viets which was conducted by Pamela James back in February 2005 for the print version of Mystery*File also appears here on the primary M*F website.

   Harold R. Daniels was nominated for an Edgar in 1955 for his first novel, In His Blood. His other five novels feature the excellence of his first: interesting plots and situations, solid characterizations, and a sense of realism few crime novels achieve.

   In His Blood (Dell, 1955) is the story of Milton Raskob, a worker at Hammersmith Chemical, a loner. Then something happens to change his dull, meaningless life:

   Raskob is seized by the urge to kill, and he does. After following a school girl after a movie, he uses his knife to butcher her. The buildup to the scene is powerful and realistic.

   Lieutenant Ed Tanager of Homicide is given the case. Tanager has personal problems: his daughter is hospitalized with suspected polio; Tanager’s wife is an emotional zombie as a result.

   Raskob endures various humiliations, and after each he feels the urge to use his knife. He almost murders a little black girl, but she gets away. Later, he butchers a small boy in the park. Finally, the fever takes over and he slits the throat of a newborn baby in its crib.

   The investigation is believable, realistic, and professional as Tanager and his men hunt for the killer. The reader feels the frustration of the lack of clues; but he also feels for Raskob as a man driven beyond his limits.

   In His Blood isn’t a perfect book. Daniel’s writing style has its weaknesses, and the dialogue wanders into cliches too frequently. But In His Blood is a superb study of a modern day Ripper.

   Daniels’ second book, The Girl in 304 (Dell, 1956), begins with the body of a young woman found in the woods: stripped and stabbed to death. For a moment I thought Daniels was going to tell the same story as In His Blood, only this time from the perspective of a Georgia sheriff, Ed Masters.

   But this time we aren’t dealing with a psychopath: there’s motive and deception involved here. The plotting is tight and the characters are more fully developed than those of In His Blood.

   I liked The Girl in 304 because Masters must first learn the secrets of the dead woman before he can find the killer, and in that process we discover truths about Masters and ourselves.

   With The Accused (Dell, 1958), Daniels attempts something new. The format is radically different: sections of testimony introduce the narrative. The evidence presented in the trial is expanded and amplified by the chapter that follows it.

   Alvin Morlock is a simple man teaching at a small college. He is unexceptional. He lives a lonely, studious life. But he meets Louise Palaggi, a tramp, and in a moment of supreme foolishness marries her. From that moment he is doomed.

   But Daniels is subtle enough to make Morelock’s fate a tragic event by increments. Although two people are destroyed in this book, the crime is one of being punished for stupidity and pride rather than the usual premeditation. The Accused displays Daniels’ growth in writing skill and characterizations.

   With his next book, Daniels gets even better. John D. MacDonald said, “Harold Daniels’ The Snatch belongs among the modern classics of crime and punishment.” The Snatch (Dell, 1958) involves three men desperate enough to kidnap the grandchild of a Mafia godfather, but men who lack the toughness and professionalism to get away with it.

   Mollison is a grifter who’s come to the end of his road. He’s working for a used car company and is caught trying to work a con on the company. Mollison needs money to avoid a prison sentence.

   Mollison knows Morgan, a bank teller who wants to live as well as the wealthy side of the Morgan family lives. Morgan needs money.

   Mollison also knows Patsy, a handyman of low intelligence who admires Mollison’s phony style. Mollison tricks him into a part in the scheme.

   The snatch comes off fine, but it’s the aftermath with murder and the psychological disintegration which produces the book’s finely crafted conclusion. The characters create their own doom in their own special ways.

   The Snatch is Daniels’ best balanced book, reflecting narrative control and tight plotting.

   For the Asking (Fawcett, 1962) features a character very much like Milton Raskob, the psychopath from In His Blood. Lawrence Merrick is a high school English teacher. He’s pushing forty. He has no close friends. He’s an indifferent teacher whose students consider him boring and stupid. The administration correctly labels him as a time-server.

   But when Merrick assists at a school dance, he’s presented an opportunity to exercise the power and control he craves. While searching the school grounds for necking couples. Merrick stumbles on two students about to make love: Don Scott is the teen-aged son of the town’s doctor, while the girl, Jean Cole, is from the poor side of town.

   Merrick uses his discovery of their activity to blackmail Scott for money and Jean Cole for sex. Slowly, Merrick’s power over these two young people begins the chain of events that’ll destroy them all. When Jean Cole becomes pregnant, Merrick’s mind bursts into a frenzy of hatred and murder.

   For the Asking is a solid book. Its theme of dominance and submission painfully illustrates the ironies of youth and age.

   With House on Greenapple Road (Random House, 1966; Dell, 1969) Daniels brings all of his experience and craftsmanship together. It is simply a stunning book, excellent in all respects.

   A neighbor calls the police. Detective Dan Nalon comes out to the house on Greenapple Road. Here’s how Daniels describes the community it’s a part of, Fruit Hill Farms:

   That is good writing, capturing the tedium and futility of suburban developments with cute names.

   When Nalon reaches his destination he finds a kitchen covered with blood: seven pints of it. The press converge like barracuda, calling it ‘The Red Kitchen Murder.’ However, police can’t find the body. Marian Ord, the missing woman, becomes the object of a multi-state search.

   But Nalon does a search of his own, and, like a time machine, uncovers Marian Ord’s strange, torrid past. Daniels exposes it carefully, skillfully, in a series of flashbacks. The ski instructor, the preacher, the lifeguard, the motorcycle fan, the salesman, the bookie. The path of Marian Ord’s life is like a minefield.

   Nalon follows the case to the surprising conclusion and the result is perhaps Daniels’ best book. I highly recommend House on Greenapple Road and the rest of Daniels’ novels. He’s a fine writer and his books will give you hours of suspense and enjoyment.

VINCENT STARRETT – The Case Book of Jimmie Lavender. Gold Label, hardcover, 1944. Hardcover reprint: Bookfinger, 1973.

   Comprising about a fourth of the published cases of Jimmie Lavender, the only sleuth in mystery fiction named for a major-league baseball player, these twelve tales from the Twenties and Thirties are representative examples of the now mostly forgotten detective short stories of Vincent Starrett, better known today as the biographer of Lavender’ s inspiration, Sherlock Holmes.

   By modern standards, none is of the first rank, but most are well-plotted puzzles cast in the classic mold, with a nice blend of cerebral deduction and physical action, and even fifty years and more later they have their attractions.

   Several of the victims in the ten episodes concerned with murder are dispatched in picturesque ways and in a variety of interesting settings. Among the latter: a nightclub, a cruise ship, a golf course, a hospital, a university campus not far from the grounds of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and even an airplane cockpit.

   In one of the tales, a house “vanishes”; in another, the scene of the crime itself disappears; in a third — a locked-room homicide — the case is solved twenty years before it occurs. And every so often the proceedings are enlivened with some typical Chicago-style gunplay.

   Though not as fully realized or memorably limned as some of his more celebrated Golden Age contemporaries, Lavender himself is an engaging protagonist, warm and whimsical throughout, though perhaps a bit too omniscient at times. He is aided in his investigations by his equally likable companion and chronicler, “Gilly” Gilruth, a refreshingly able Watson.

   Taken in small doses, their adventures are still fun to read, both for their own sake and as pleasantly nostalgic reminders of a more innocent era in the history of the crime-fiction genre.

   Starrett also published a number of mystery novels, none of which is particularly distinguished. Three of these feature a detective with the unlikely name of Walter Ghost: Murder on “B” Deck (1929), Dead Man Inside (1931), and The End of Mr. Garment (1932).

   Starrett’s best novel, however, is probably Murder in Peking (1946), which has a nicely evoked Chinese background. Other of Starrett’s criminous short stories can be found in Coffins for Two (1924) and The Blue Door (1930); two of the stories in the later volume feature Jimmie Lavender.

         ———
   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.

CHARLES G. BOOTH – Murder at High Tide.

William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1930. UK edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930.

   This story of a domestic tyrant who’s found murdered in his library has a lot of what attracted me to mysteries in the first place.

   Even so, while fun to read, an honest appraisal would have to rank it only a notch or so above the Hardy Boys. And as in a vintage Charlie Chan movie, the dead man’s mansion is full of suspects at each other’s throats, with wild accusations and amazing discoveries coming at every moment.

   The hero is a young antiques dealer, in his own words, an ass with women. (No further comment.) The detective is Anatole Flique, a comically suave French policeman, although the murder does take place on an island just off the California coast. In his own words, he’s the cleverest on the Paris Surete. He’s also greatly given to twirling his mustaches and busily polishing the top of his head, all the while contemplating life’s little mysteries.

   There are tons of false evidence, most of it leading to dead ends, but I think that the killer, in spite of his or her alibi, should be spotted at once. The style is not John Dickson Carr’s, but it is his kind of story. If there’s no locked room, it’s only because then there wouldn’t have been quite so much fun with alibi-breaking, which in Murder at High Tide is the name of this particular game.

[UPDATE] 01-14-09.  One of the revisions I made was to add the name of the French detective who worked on this case. Obviously I had no idea that he appeared in more than one book, but he did. From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s his complete dossier:

FLIQUE, ANATOLE [Charles G. Booth]
       o Murder at High Tide (n.) Morrow 1930 [California]
       o The Cat and the Clock (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Los Angeles, CA]
       o Kings Die Hard (n.) Hammond 1949 [California; 1929]

   This last book never had a US edition. It came out in 1949, the same year that the author died. According to Wikipedia, Charles G. Booth was “a British-born writer who settled in America and wrote several classic Hollywood stories, including The General Died at Dawn (1936) and Sundown (1941). He won an Academy Award for Best Story for The House on 92nd Street in 1945. […] He also penned the source story for Paul Mazursky’s 1988 film Moon Over Parador.”

   I’d never realized until now that Booth was originally from England. Besides the fiction he wrote in novel form, I know his name from many stories he wrote for Black Mask, the quintessential hard-boiled American detective pulp magazine.

   In fact, he has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the three authors whose stories were deleted from the paperback edition of The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (Simon & Schuster, 1946), edited by Joseph T. Shaw. This is a great reason why you should own the hardcover edition, not just the one reprinted by Pocket (1952).

FATAL MISSION. 1990; aka Enemy. Peter Fonda, Tia Carrere, Mako, James Mitchum, Ted Markland. Co-screenwriter: Peter Fonda (*). Director: George Rowe.

   Ninety percent of this movie reminded me of a book in a poor man’s Edward S. Aarons “Assignment” series. Peter Fonda, as the CIA agent who assassinates a North Vietnamese general and tries to get away with it, with a little more prompting might make a fairly decent Sam Durell, but in the end he’s undone by the ending itself.

   I’ll get to that in a minute, but let me mention a couple of other things first. (1) Tia Ferrare may be an exotic-looking beauty, but to my eye she really doesn’t look Chinese, and that’s what she’s supposed to be in this movie, as the ChiCom who first chases Fonda to ground, then becomes his prisoner and finally his guide to freedom.

   As for (2), what do you suppose happens to Fonda’s first guide, a man who tells him “Once I get you back in one piece, I get ticket to USA…” ? (If this were a quiz, I can’t imagine anybody getting this one wrong.)

   The scenery is very nice, and the small little plot twist is acceptably nasty, but the ending is not so much downbeat as it is flat. Downbeat (I grant you) is par for the course in spy stories, as well as for Vietnam movies in general, but this ending is so meaningless as to make the movie that preceded it barely worth watching.

   I imagine you could make the point that the ending has as much meaning as the war itself. That could be, but I’d be hard pressed to say that there’s any reason for watching this movie a second time. (On the other hand, I’d have to agree with the basic premise that’s at work here: there isn’t any reason for redoing that foolish war either.)

      ____

    (*) Along with four other people, if you can imagine that. Each one must have been in charge of twelve lines of dialogue. This is an Action Picture.

[UPDATE] 01-14-09.   I remember nothing about this movie at all — nothing more than the review above, which I assume I wrote soon after I watched it. The revisions I did were only to improve the sentence structure now and there.

   I can’t even speak to what I felt was a major point of the film, but if the basic premise is what I seem to have suggested it is, then I certainly wish somebody had been listening (and learning) when it was important to listen.

[LATER]  I’ve just watched a trailer for the movie on YouTube. I still don’t remember the movie, and the trailer instills in me no great desire to rummage around for my copy of it on VHS.

MARY DAHEIM – Just Desserts.

Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1991. Reprinted many times; a later cover is shown.

   Another first novel, so far as I know [it was], and like Gloria White’s Murder on the Run (reviewed here earlier), one that takes place in contemporary California. Other than that, the difference between this book and the other is nearly without measure.

   So that you should not get me wrong, each book has a heroine rather than a hero, but where PI Ronnie Ventura is almost as tough as the guys she hangs out with, Judith Grover McGonigle is a widow trying to make ends meet with a newly established Bed-and-Breakfast in her home, and she and her cousin Renie are both as suburbanly house-wifey as they come.

   And when a family of wacky eccentrics descends on her house (while their own is being fumigated), and when the murder of a charlatan fortune-teller occurs the same evening the contents of a will are going to be disclosed, and when the investigating officer turns out to be Joe Flynn, an old beau who mysteriously disappeared on Judith 25 years ago, why then, you might get the idea you’ve read all this before.

   The clutter and clamor do not die down for an instant. Everybody seems to have known or have been related to the dead woman some time or another, and everyone appears to have a motive. None of it seems to matter, though. Nobody seems to care very much, though they say they do, or maybe it was just me.

   I also found it difficult enough to keep all the names straight, much less worry about small things like why the police let everyone roam all around the house, inside and out, and how the neighbors manage to pop in and out with important evidence without anyone being aware of it.

   There is a small mystery about Joe Flynn’s marriage and impending annulment, and somewhere between pages 101 and 102 something seems to have gotten terribly garbled, as though somebody left out several pages of text. In all the confusion that is supposed to pass for mysterious happenings, I guess not even whoever was supposed to have edited this book happened to notice.

   Let me leave you with this small quote from the end of the book (page 203). It will tell you as best as I could otherwise where a sizable part of Judith McGonigle’s mind is really at:

[UPDATE] 01-13-09. From 1983 through 1992, Mary Daheim wrote historical romances, seven in all, but her career as a writer didn’t really begin until she switched to writing mysteries in 1991 with Just Desserts.

In spite of my reservations about the book, it has struck a chord with a sizable segment of the mystery reading population. There are now 25 books in the series, either published or forthcoming

   That’s more than a book a year, on the average — work out the math — but in the same time period, Mary Daheim has written 21 books in yet another series, this one the Emma Lord mysteries, beginning with The Alpine Advocate in 1992. (The title refers to the newspaper that Emma Lord publishes and edits in a small town in Washington state.)

   But getting back to Judith McGonigle, rather than put the inevitable off any longer, by Dune to Death, the fourth book in the series, she’d married Joe Flynn, and all of their subsequent adventures were as husband and wife. (Seeing that she had a good thing going, she didn’t give up the Bed-and-Breakfast, though.)

   That Ellery Queen’s International Case Book is not included in Hubin’s Bibliography gives credence to what is only implied in the book itself — these short accounts are of true occurrences.

   If correct, several of these criminal cases deserve more detailed and less dramatised presentation than given here in what were originally articles for a Sunday supplement.

   Particularly interesting are the bank robber who, posing as a health officer, poisoned all the employees of a bank so that he could gather and carry off his loot unimpeded; the mistress who had her lover blinded so that she could care for him for years and thereby be permitted to obtain respectability through marrying him; and the banker who dismembered and disfigured his laborer rival, hired a sculptor to make for the police a representation of the deceased as the banker to convince them the wrong man died, but was caught because he couldn’t permit the calloused hands to be found.

   And yet, as elsewhere, one regrets the slipshod artistic integrity of the later Queen in the presentation of these cases.

         * * * * * * * *

   Recently I was stranded nearly bookless and erroneously chose John Dickson Carr’s Captain Cut-Throat over a couple of unappetizing offerings by Marsh and Lathen. I realized, part way through it, that I had read it twice before and, by the time I finished, that it is the worst mystery I’ve read.

   I think Carr was writing for Hollywood, and he achieved the almost impossible of under-estimating producers’ intelligence. The less said about this book, the better.

      Bibliographic data:

ELLERY QUEEN – Ellery Queen’s International Case Book. Dell 2260, paperback original, 1964.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – Captain Cut-Throat. Harper & Brothers, US, hardcover, 1955. UK edition: Hamish Hamilton, hc, 1955 (shown). Paperback reprints (US): Bantam A1472, 1956; F2708, 1963; Charter, 1980, Carroll & Graf, 1998.

       From the two Bantam editions:

    “The roistering novel of swashbuckling men and gallant ladies in the desperate days when Napoleon held his armies poised like a lance at the heart of England.”

        and

    “He killed by night — without reason, without mercy, without leaving a trace. A novel of murder, menace and desperate revenge.”