Re: Charles Starrett. He holds the record for most starring Westerns made by one star at the same studio: 131, for Columbia Pictures, produced and released over a 17-year period. He played the Durango Kid in half of them, all but the first released between 1945 and 1952.

   Although the Durangos are very fondly remembered by aging Western fans who saw them in Saturday-matinee engagements, they’re generally cheap, shoddy productions with cookie-cutter plots and puerile comic relief.

   Starrett’s earlier Westerns — especially the 1937-40 pictures in which his regular leading lady was Iris Meredith (the subject of a recent M*F thread) and his sidekicks the Sons of the Pioneers — were his best.

   I met Starrett twice and spoke to him at length about his career. His favorite among those early Westerns was also mine: Outlaws of the Prairie (1938, based on a Harry F. Olmsted story originally published in Dime Western), which cast him as a deadly “fanner” who has spent his entire adult life looking for the renegade who killed his father and cut off his trigger fingers.

   Starrett was also very fond of a short-lived series — also based on pulp stories — casting him as Dr. Steven Monroe, aka The Medico, a frontier doctor who occasionally used his guns in defense of the law.

ANGELA AMATO & JOE SHARKEY – Lady Gold. St. Martin’s, reprint paperback; 1st printing, October 1999. Hardcover edition: August 1998.

   From reading the biographical information about Angela Amato inside the back cover, one could easily get the impression (I did) that the story in Lady Gold could in large part be autobiographical. Her life story, in the guise of that of NYPD police detective Gerry Conte, could easily be “as told to” Joe Sharkey, a columnist for the New York Times, at least at the time this paperback edition came out.

   Angelo Amato, we are told, was an officer and a detective for the NYPD for over a decade. See above. Now a criminal defense attorney, she is in private practice in New York and Florida. In Lady Gold, Gerry Conte is in her last semester of law school. And the book reads like one of the most authentic police procedurals I’ve had in my hands in quite a while.

   Gerry’s primary function is babysitting a CI — a Confidential Informant — who’s the nephew of one Anthony Rossi, an underboss in the New York City Mafia. Trapped on some minor charges, Eugene Rossi has agreed to help get the goods on Tony, who in turn may help nab the real target, the top guy himself, Sal Messina.

   Working undercover like this is slow and often unproductive work, and the book often reads that way too. Flurries of action, once quite deadly, then long lulls of relative calm. Leads spring up, then fizzle out. Gerry’s problem, though, is of her own making. She gets too close to Eugene, whom she recognizes as illiterate and weak in the ways of the real world – so much so that the oral agreement he’s made with the D.A.’s office is not worth (as they say) the paper it’s not written on.

   Is Gerry too close to closing the line? Once Eugene Rossi has testified, if the case ever gets that far, he’ll be hung out to dry. No witness protection program for him, no matter what he’s been lead to believe. Is she a woman or is she a cop? In the male-dominated world of cops and lawyers, it’s not a good question.

   This is inside stuff that is going on in Lady Gold. All the details ring true. If the going is slow at first, stay with it. The pages of the last third of the book will flicker by in a blur.

PostScript. After Lady Gold was written, and with no other books to her credit, Angela Amato became a consultant for the NBC series Third Watch (1999-2005), and as Angela Amato Velez, wrote four of the episodes.

   From Wikipedia: The series was “set in New York City… It followed the exploits of a group of police officers, firefighters, and paramedics in the fictional 55th Precinct and Fire Station 55 whose shifts fell between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m, the ‘third watch.’”

MACKENNA’S GOLD. Columbia Pictures, 1969. Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas, Julie Newmar, Camilla Sparv, Keenan Wynn, Ted Cassidy, Eduardo Ciannelli, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Massey, Burgess Meredith, Anthony Quayle, Edward G. Robinson, Eli Wallach.
   Narrated by Victor Jory. Based on the novel by Will Henry. Director: J. Lee Thompson.

   Now this is what you can call an epic!

   Over two hours of gold fever: outlaws teamed up with honest townspeople, evading the cavalry, being chased by Indians, crossing rapid rivers, through treacherous mountains, across deserts, into secret valleys seen by only one white man before, and his eyes were taken from him before he could return to tell the tale.

   There is only one honest man in this picture, and that is the sheriff (Gregory Peck) who mistakenly kills the Indian chieftain who has the map, and he’s in constant trouble from that time on.

   Peck is also the only leading player in this picture who does not seem seriously miscast for his or her part. I mean, come on, Telly Savalas as a cavalry officer? Julie Newmar as the most statuesque Indian this continent has ever seen? Camilla Sparv as the kidnapped blonde and blue-eyed daughter of a murdered judge?   (*)

   Other critical sources appear to be united in saying that this movie is overblown, over-produced, and not very good, either. It’s still a highly entertaining film, in spite of what they say.

   It’s tough to keep a good western story down, and if you don’t like the story, you can always watch the scenery. It’s terrific.

____

  (*) Looking through the credits again, I’m willing to reconsider that statement, just a little. Keenan Wynn is perfect as the drunken lout of a sidekick for the notorious Mexican bandit, Colorado. (Played by Omar Sharif, of course.)

[UPDATE] 01-12-09.   I found a few other scenes taken from the movie that I could have added to show you, but the review was too short to accommodate them all. (Sorry.) The only other comment I could add is that my younger self has convinced me, if nobody else, that this is a film that’s a Must See Again.

EDWINA NOONE – Dark Cypress.

Ace K-213, paperback original; 1st printing, 1965. Reprinted at least once.

   Edwina Noone was, as you might have guessed, if you didn’t already know, one of the pseudonyms of Michael Avallone, one of more prolific writers of the 60s and 70s. As the author of a long armful of detective novels, his primary private eye character — and probably his favorite — was the inimitable Ed Noon, the books in which he appeared I should really unpack and read again soon.

   Avallone as Noone stays totally within the restrictions of the gothic romance novel, however, as practiced in the 60s and 70s, and except for sheer readability, perhaps, there’s nothing in this tale’s style of writing to suggest that it was Avallone who was really at the wheel.

   We move from Cornwall (see my earlier review of The Shadow of Polperro, by Frances Cowen) to Connecticut. From the present day when the previous book took place, we shift in time to some unidentified period in the past. Rather than a desolate castle on a rocky coastline, the focus is instead a grove of cypress trees surrounding a bathing pool behind a huge manor house.

   A young girl comes to be the tutor of a young motherless boy, his aloof father and two servants the only other occupants of a house that’s full of secrets. Many another gothic novel has started in very much the same way. The boy’s older brother is dead, drowned in the pool behind the house, a magnificent lad; a prodigy, the housekeeper says. The mother had died at childbirth. The younger boy never knew her.

   Very atmospheric, and although you can read pages at a single glance, the tension builds so that you can all but feel it. Built to a formula, but in the hands of a man (in this case) born to write, formulas can also have substance.

[UPDATE] 01-12-09. Another reason you should go back to the review I posted of The Shadow of Polperro is that in the comments afterward Xavier Lechard and I had a brief exchange about the formula that most gothics were structured on, plus a display of a few of their covers in their French incarnations.

   The following list does not include all of the gothic romances written by the late Michael Avallone, only the ones for which his Edwina Noone byline was used. (He also wrote gothics as by Priscilla Dalton, Jean-Anne de Pre, Dora Highland and Dorothea Nile.) Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

NOONE, EDWINA. Pseudonym of Michael Avallone.

      Corridor of Whispers (n.) Ace 1965
      Dark Cypress (n.) Ace 1965
      Heirloom of Tragedy (n.) Lancer 1965
      Daughter of Darkness (n.) Signet 1966
      The Second Secret (n.) Belmont 1966
      The Victorian Crown (n.) Belmont 1966

      Seacliffe (n.) Signet 1968

      The Craghold Legacy (n.) Beagle 1971
      The Cloisonne Vase (n.) Curtis 1972
      The Craghold Creatures (n.) Beagle 1972
      The Craghold Curse (n.) Beagle 1972
      The Craghold Crypt (n.) Curtis 1973

   Of the two covers shown, note that the first is a stylized version containing all of the traditional ingredients, while the second features photographed models, rarely used for gothics, with a close-up shot of only their faces.

   The book itself was marketed as “a novel of high romance,” so it was an obvious attempt to move away from the typical gothic novel. Nonetheless the blurb on the front cover gives it away: “… dark tale of foreboding love between the daughter of a Yankee captain and a mysterious seafaring stranger, on the windswept coast of Maine.”

SHE LOVED A FIREMAN. 1937. Dick Foran, Ann Sheridan, Robert Armstrong, Eddie Acuff, Veda Ann Borg. Director: John Farrow.

   If you don’t like movies about firemen, the only reason I can come up with as to why you might want to watch this one anyway is that Ann Sheridan is in this one, too. (See my review of The Patient in Room 18 which I posted here not so long ago.) TNT recently ran these movies back-to-back, and I didn’t get the connection until I finally got around to watching them.

   There is very little plot to She Loved a Fireman. What there is, is a lot of documentary footage showing what it takes to become a firemen, how to get through fire college and so on, but the story itself is pretty slim.

   Dick Foran plays “Red” Tyler, an ex-bookie and a small-time political hack who, when he needs a job, decides to become a fireman. He gets on the wrong side of the captain, however (Robert Armstrong), and to get his goat he tries to charm his way into the life of the older man’s sister, which is where Ann Sheridan comes in.

   While Foran is an oaf — a good-natured one, but still an oaf — I think you can tell even from this mediocre film that Miss Sheridan had chances to go places in the movies.

   Other than this one small positive note, you’ll have to wait for the final scenes — there’s just got to be a big fire in a movie like this, doesn’t there? — to find any other excuse for not doing whatever else it was you were supposed to be doing instead of watching this movie. (Never mind. Ann Sheridan is reason enough.)

[UPDATE] 01-12-09. Even though we really are digging into obscurity when we watch picture shows like this one, there’s almost always something positive that can be said about even the most underwhelming B-movie (like this one).

   Don’t take just my word for it. It’s not only me. Everyone who’s left a comment about this film on IMDB is in total agreement that Ann Sheridan is the standout attraction, if not the only one.

   But if that isn’t enough to help you decide whether or not to watch this movie the next time it comes around on TCM, they’ve helpfully provided an online trailer for it. I’ve just watched it, and if you’ve read this far, I think you should too.

   Truth in advertising. The photo you see here of Miss Sheridan has no other connection with Fireman. It’s a publicity shot for a movie called Winter Carnival, which came out a couple of years later, in 1939.

CRIME AGAINST JOE. Bel-Air Productions/United Artists, 1956. John Bromfield, Julie London, Henry Calvin, Patricia Blake, Joel Ashley, Robert Keyes, Joyce Jameson. Screenwriter: Robert C. Dennis, based on a story by Decla Dunning. Director: Lee Sholem.

   Crime Against Joe is a flick with some nice moments; those who classify it as film noir, however, overstate the case. It should be of interest to many of you mainly because it is a whodunit.

   Joe (John Bromfield) is an unsuccessful artist (who would be a starving artist if his mother didn’t support him); he gets rip-roaring drunk one night and motors to a local drive-in restaurant where young and attractive “Slacks” (Julie London) works. She talks him out of any more drunk driving; Slacks calls for their mutual friend Red the cabbie to take Joe home.

   Instead, Joe insists on being taken to a local nightclub, where he has a brief encounter with the chanteuse. The barkeep hauls him outside and punches him, and he collapses in a dusty heap; Joe is barely aware of a man later known as “the cowboy” who helps him to his feet.

   Without a car, Joe staggers off and encounters a young woman walking in a daze; he helps her to her house nearby, where her father expresses his gratitude. Still thoroughly drunk, Joe wanders away before the father returns to the front door.

   The next morning, Joe, nursing the mother of all hangovers, is confronted by a police lieutenant; it seems that at the same time Joe was out and about, the chanteuse was getting herself murdered. Joe is now the prime suspect; down at the station, he can’t believe it when just about everyone he encountered that night — but especially the barkeep and the father of the dazed girl — lies about having seen him.

   Only Slacks is willing to alibi him, but she tells a lie in doing so. At least it gets Joe out of the clink; he turns (not very good) amateur sleuth and along with Slacks begins narrowing down a list of 87 possible suspects to just four. What he doesn’t know until it’s almost too late is that the real killer isn’t one of those four ….

   Clearly this was a low-budget production; every scene was filmed in an actual location, and I doubt if any money was spent on set construction. The lack of money may or may not explain the muddled script; an attempted murder is shown and never referred to again. And the director does a poor job at times: When the killer is confessing, instead of a closeup showing that person’s remorse we get a medium-longshot in profile (not much information content).

   The violence content is also low: We never see the murder or even the face of the victim. A later scene with the killer is actually more effective because of the way it is shot: Someone is climbing a staircase and the audience sees the killer only in silhouette raise a club and bring it down out of camera range; this victim then tumbles noisily down the stairs, giving Julie London an opportunity to emit a piercing scream.

   Crime Against Joe could have been a great film, but the low budget sabotaged it. Still, it is a whodunit; the murderer’s identity is withheld until the last possible moment. And how many mysteries — filmic or otherwise — have been solved by the sleuths rummaging through the permanent academic records of high school students?

      * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

   I remember John Bromfield primarily from his TV series Sheriff of Cochise (1956-58):

   Beside recording 32 albums as a singer, co-star Julie London had a long Hollywood career:

      * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“What’s your attitude about girls, Joe?”
“I think they’re here to stay.”

      * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Slacks, are you a nice girl, Slacks?”
“Well, either way I wouldn’t want it known.”

      * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

DAWN ON THE GREAT DIVIDE. Monogram, 1942. Buck Jones, Mona Barrie, Raymond Hatton, Rex Bell, Tristram Coffin, Lee Shumway, Roy Barcroft, Harry Woods. Screenwriter: Adele Buffington; based on the story “Wheels of Fire,” by James Oliver Curwood. Director: Howard Bretherton.

   The movie’s only 63 minutes long, about the same as every other B-western made in the 1940s, but the budget for Dawn on the Great Divide has to have been higher than most of them. The full cast, if not in the thousands, runs to nearly 40 in all, and the re-creation of a wagon train heading west, headed by Buck Roberts (Buck Jones), is nicely done in authentic-looking detail.

   In some ways, this might even be considered a forerunner of the TV series called Wagon Train that came along much later. Each group of travelers has their own story, and not all of them turn out to be happy ones.

   Unfortunately there’s not time enough to tell all of them, but Buck certainly has his hands full as he does his best to deal with them. The greatest obstacle in their path, however, is the gang of crooks waiting for them at Beaver Lake, if they can only get there.

   Some sources say that this movie was meant to be part of Monogram’s “Rough Riders” series (Buck Jones, Raymond Hatton & Rex Bell), and so it says on the DVD case, but there’s no indication of it anywhere in the on-screen credits.

   Sad to say, this was Buck Jones’ last movie. It ends with him heading out with the wagons, but saying to Sadie Rand (Mona Barrie) that maybe he ought to settle down, and aw shucks, ma’am, maybe she wouldn’t mind waiting for him until he heads back that way again.

   But before the movie was even released, Buck Jones was one of the hundreds who perished in a notorious fire at the Coconut Grove nightclub in Boston late in November 1942 while he was on a publicity tour for Monogram Pictures.

   He was 50 years old when he died, and as I watched the movie, I saw some resemblances between him and Randolph Scott as he appeared in his later westerns: a bit haggard, but rugged and solid, and very much a man of the west. I’m also glad that I didn’t realize that this was his last movie as I was watching. It’s a fine tribute to his memory, but there are times like this that you prefer not knowing.

   
OCTAVUS ROY COHEN – Midnight.   Dodd Mead & Co., hardcover, 1922. British edition: Eveleigh Nash, hc, 1922.

   On a sleety December night taxi-driver Spike Walters picks up a fare at Union Station. The well-dressed, veiled woman instructs Walters to drive to a poorer part of town but when he arrives at the address given, she has vanished from his cab, leaving her suitcase — and a man’s body.

   Of the missing woman Spike asks himself, as will the reader, “Where was she? How had she managed to leave the taxicab? When had the man, who now lay sprawled in the cab, entered it?”

   Chief of Police Eric Leverage and amateur criminologist David Carroll cooperate in solving the crime. The departed is identified as club man Roland Warren, a cad rumoured to have been involved with a number of socially prominent married women although there has been no open scandal, and just as well being as he is engaged.

   It transpires every article in the suitcase belonged to him and this, along with certain other evidence, convinces the authorities and the public that Warren was planning to elope — but not with his fiancee.

   Given the dead man’s reputation of not being too fussy about whose wife he romances, a number of upper crust persons naturally come under suspicion, and then there’s Warren’s just discharged valet, not to mention the bereaved fiancee.

My verdict: Midnight features a fairly complex plot unreeled at a slower pace than in many works. Older novels of detection often display social mores that seem strange to modern eyes, for example not mentioning a woman’s name at the club, or the terrible consequences of cheating at cards, or in some other way being touched by the rancid breath of scandal.

   David Carroll must navigate these treacherous waters to solve the mystery of the who and how and why of the crime.

Etext: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/1/0/4/11043/11043.txt

ROBERT CRAIS – The Watchman. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, February 2007. Paperback reprint: Pocket Star, January 2008.

   Elvis Cole’s sidekick, Joe Pike, takes on the job of keeping a young L.A. socialite, Larkin Conner Barkley, from being killed after she is involved in a late night collision that lands her in the middle of an undercover federal investigation.

   Somebody in a very small group is leaking information about her various hiding places, and with that group including her father and FBI agents, Joe is very much on his own as he tries to keep one step ahead of the unknown assailants.

   This is a gripping page-turner, although Joe loses some of his mysterious charisma as he reveals some of his past and connects with the rebellious Larkin.

IAN RANKIN – The Naming of the Dead. Little Brown, hardcover, April 2007; reprint paperback: September 2008.

   Inspector Rebus is, perhaps, a year or so away from retirement, and he’s assigned to a very nonessential station, where he’ll be out of harm’s way, “harm” being his tendency to involve himself in cases in ways that rile his superiors and don’t make him the most popular DI among his colleagues.

   When a delegate to an international conference falls to his death, Rebus is assigned to what appears to be a suicide. However, he suspects it’s more than that, and while he’s trying to follow up on this case, he’s drawn into the investigation of murders of several sex offenders.

   This is a dense, well-coordinated procedural that was less satisfying for me than earlier novels in the series, but rewards some patient reading and willingness to follow the author through the maze of interlocking characters and plot threads.

ANNE PERRY – Dark Assassin. Ballantine Books, hardcover, March 2006; reprint paperback: February 2007.

   Another in the long series of William Monk novels, which I abandoned after he found solace in marriage and put to rest some of the ghosts that haunted him in his attempts to recover the memory of his past.

   Monk is now working for the river patrol and he and his men witness a argument that ends with the young couple falling to their deaths from a bridge. The investigation of what initially appears to be a suicide and a futile attempt by the young man to save his fiancee widens to include a threat to Metropolitan London from underground excavations for the subway system.

   A dour series that I find I still enjoy, peopled with characters from all levels of society and presenting a convincing portrait of Victorian London.

RICHARD STARK – Butcher’s Moon.

Random House, hardcover, 1974. Paperback reprint: Avon, 1985. UK edition: Coronet, pb, 1977.

   To date [1986] there have been sixteen novels about hard-bitten professional thief Parker, and Butcher’s Moon is the sixteenth. Nearly twice as long as any single previous entry in the series, it represents a culmination of themes and a summation of events, but leaves the eager reader afraid that Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) may have nothing left to say about his enigmatic antihero. Since at this writing it has been ten years since the publication of Butcher’s Moon, that conclusion seems warranted.

   Parker and his sometime partner, actor Alan Grofield, return to Tyler, the scene of a botched armored-car robbery of several years previous, the take of which was abandoned out of necessity. At the time Parker had said, “I know where it is. Someday I’ll go back and get it.”

   That day is now, and Parker sets out to retrieve the money from Lonzini, the mobster Parker figures found the money. When Lonzini fails to cooperate, Parker and Grofield begin pulling jobs — hitting a gambling casino, drug dealer, numbers operation, etc. Much like the Continental Op in Hammett’s Red Harvest, Parker’s activities trigger power plays within the local mob, while the level of violence escalates.

   When Grofield is captured, Parker assembles a string of thieves (characters from previous Stark novels) to pull a simultaneous series of capers he has carefully worked out. From the grand haul these jobs will realize, Parker plans to take no share — he merely asks his fellow thieves to repay him for his work by helping him afterward: “I want Grofield back, and I want my money. And I want those people dead.”

   The twelve men are to hit the mob “safe house” where Grofield is being held, and kill all his captors. Stark builds climax upon climax as the various capers play out and as bullets fly and bodies pile up.

   Butcher’s Moon brings Parker full circle: Taking on the mob in order to retrieve “his” money (never mind that it was stolen from somebody else to begin with) was where Parker began in the trilogy of The Hunter (1962), The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), and The Outfit (1963).

   Significantly, Butcher’s Moon reveals Parker a changed man. While neither he nor Stark would likely admit it, Parker has “mellowed” — he gathers his friends together to rescue a friend. And as one of those friends, father figure Handy McKay, tells him, “That’s not like you … going to all this trouble for somebody else ”

   Handy also questions Parker’s seeking revenge: “I’ve never seen you do anything but play the hand you were dealt.”

   Parker’s association with Grofield and his attachment to his live-in love, Claire (begun in The Rare Coin Score, 1967), have ever so subtly humanized him. This seems to make him, and Stark, uneasy. And that may explain the long silence from Stark since Butcher’s Moon.

    If Butcher’s Moon is indeed the final Parker, crime fiction’s greatest antihero certainly goes out with a bang, with all the cast brought back on stage for one last supercaper. And while he may indeed be turning into a human being, Parker is no less capable of his usual coldblooded violence.

   Nor is Stark shy about depicting such shocking scenes as the one in which Parker is delivered a severed finger that once belonged to Grofield (not only a continuing character in this series but the hero of four of his own Stark novels). When the mob bearer of these bloody tidings says “I’m only the messenger,” Parker shoots and kills him, saying, “Now you’re the message.”

         ———
   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.