● Overture to Death. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1939. Lee Furman, US, hardcover, 1939. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and soft.
● Black As He’s Painted. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1974. Little Brown, US, hc, 1974. Also reprinted many times.
– Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 10, No. 4, Fall 1988 (very slightly revised).
For new generations of mystery fans some other fine works are available in recent reprints, including Ngaio Marsh’s best book, Overture to Death (1939), provided to us by Jove. Here are some devastating portraits of people in a small British village and a murder method as unusual as any I can recall.
Roderick Alleyn’s questioning of suspects, sometimes too lengthy, seems just right here, and everything gets wrapped up in one of Marsh’s best solutions.
For Marsh in a more modern vein, try Black As He’s Painted (1974), also from Jove. Not only do we get the contemporary London scene, but we even have a murder at the embassy of an emerging African state, the ruler of which went to school with Alleyn. (Troy Alleyn has been commissioned to paint his portrait while he is in London.)
Some 35 years after she hit her peak, Marsh was more interested in bringing realism to her scenes and her characters. She did this successfully in her later books, and while her puzzles were not as good as they once had been, they were adequate, and the overall effect was to give us books, such as Black as He’s Painted, which could be enjoyed on several levels.
FREDERICK C. DAVIS – Another Morgue Heard From. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1954. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, Jan 1955. Digest-sized paperback reprint: Bestseller Mystery B192 (abridged), no date stated [1956]. Published in the UK by Victor Gollancz, 1955, hc, as Deadly Bedfellows as by Stephen Ransome.
In response to an appeal from a boyhood friend, Luke Speare, of the Cole Detective Agency, goes to Lake Haven in an unknown state to investigate he knows not what. Under protest, his boss, Schyler Cole, always uncomfortable outside of New York City and demanding the noisiest hotel room in the small town so he will be able to get to sleep, accompanies him.
Speare’s friend is running a political campaign and has been receiving anonymous phone calls about some major problem. But is the problem political or personal? The friend won’t say, the friend’s estranged wife lies and tries to get Speare and Cole to return to New York, and then murder occurs.
At one point Cole says: “Every woman is a special case, all right, and that’s for sure. Everyone of them thinks of herself as an exception, and what’s more she is.” The politician’s wife fits this description, and without her silence two murders and an attempted murder would not have taken place.
A good investigation here, though not strictly fair play. Most enjoyable is Cole, who heads the two-man agency of which Speare is the brains. Cole would have pulled out of this investigation early on if he hadn’t been afraid he’d lose Spear and have to start doing some work himself.
– From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 13, No. 3,
Summer 1992.
Bibliographic Data: [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]
SCHYLER COLE and LUKE SPEARE:
o The Deadly Miss Ashley (n.) Doubleday 1950.
o Lilies in Her Garden Grew (n.) Doubleday 1951.
o Tread Lightly, Angel (n.) Doubleday 1952.
o Drag the Dark (n.) Doubleday 1953.
o Another Morgue Heard From (n.) Doubleday 1954.
o Night Drop (n.) Doubleday 1955.
NEVER TRUST A GAMBLER. Columbia, 1951. Dane Clark, Cathy O’Donnell, Tom Drake, Jeff Corey, Myrna Dell, Rhys Williams. Story and screenplay: Jerome Odlum. Director: Ralph Murphy.
It wasn’t planned this way — it happened only by chance — but here immediately on the heels of another Dane Clark film, The Toughest Man Alive, reviewed here, is another one, this one coming out four years earlier. (In between but not reported on here was a TV show I watched, the first episode of Vega$, vintage 1978, in which Clark played a no-good talent agent up to his ears in debt.)
Clark’s career lasted until 1989, when he was 77 and an appearance on an episode of Murder, She Wrote. I don’t know how feisty he was then, but in 1951 he was definitely a small keg of dynamite about to go off, and go off he does.
To back up just a little, in Gambler he plays a key witness who goes on the lam during a murder trial in San Francisco and heads for Los Angeles where his ex-wife (beautifully petite Cathy O’Donnell) lives. It seems she divorced him because of his addiction for gambling.
Swearing that he’s turned over the new leaf and that he’s a new man, he asks her to hide him out for a while. If he were to testify, he says, it would put his best friend in the death house, a friend who’s innocent.
If he doesn’t testify, the friend goes free. It’s a long set-up, and forgive me for telling it all to you, but it’s only the beginning. When a lecherous off-duty cop makes a play for his ex-wife, Clark’s character explodes, and while it’s an accident, the cop ends up dead.
Convincing the ex-Mrs. Steve Garry to go along with him — and at this point she doesn’t know how much of his story to believe or not — Garry goes for the cover-up. Big mistake, as things begin to unravel quickly from there, as cover-ups always do.
I’m sure that the story line sounds completely over the top, and perhaps it is, but both the screenwriter and the director had me hooked from the first scene on. Disregarding all of the coincidences that clutter up small B-movies like this one, the film is a small and all-but-unknown gem, tautly plotted with lots of small scenes each of which add little to the story but (in total) plenty in verisimilitude. (Though personally I could have done without the long, drawn-out escape scene at the end — who’s trying to escape, and from whom, I will not tell you).
MAX BRAND – Big Game. Warner Paperback Library, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1973. First published in Argosy as a six-part serial, beginning 9 May 1936.
It’s hard to think of Max Brand, Frederick Schiller Faust, in terms of anything but superlatives and broken records.
One of the great pulp writers, he went on to live in an Italian villa where he hosted guests like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, then became the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood penning, among others, Errol Flynn’s last great swashbuckler, The Adventures of Don Juan. He died in World War II Italy as a war correspondent for Harpers Magazine during the battle of Santa Maria Infante.
Though he is best known for his westerns, Max Brand penned a little of everything under a dizzying array of names, from science fiction, to historical novels, to the Dr. Kildare series, to spy stories, to hard boiled crime tales.
Big Game falls in the latter category and involves Terry Radway, a one time big game hunter still bearing the scars of a too close encounter with a tiger, and down on his luck. Looking for adventure closer to home, Radway finds it right under his nose when he spies the pretty girl in a room across the street preparing to kill herself.
At first Radway only watches in a somewhat detached manner, but pretty soon he can’t help himself and intervenes. Seems the girl, Nell, is in trouble with a Hollywood big shot named Hugo Bigi. Radway decides to take matters in is own hand and pays a visit to Bigi, and being who he is puts the game to the big shot in the only way he knows how:
“When in the course of human events,” said Radway, “it becomes necessary for one man to hunt down another like a beast, a decent respect for the opinion of mankind should lead him to state the reason for his action. In this case, Bigi, you are the beast and I am the hunter.”
But things aren’t that simple, and soon Radway also finds himself involved with civic minded reform committee lawyer John Battersby Wilson, who has begun a private crusade to shut down the rackets in New York.
After saving Wilson from a car full of killers, Radway is enlisted in that crusade — which leads to the doorstep of banker Chandler Orme Gregor, and back to Bigi who ends up ironically enlisted in Radway’s crusade to smash the men behind the crime ring.
With the help of a couple of hoods originally hired to follow him, and the beautiful Lady Nell, who isn’t all she seemed, Radway tackles the drug ring and begins to root out the men behind the rackets, including the biggest of them all, the big game, the secret face behind the rackets controlling the city.
The prose is tough and lean in the appropriate manner:
He shifted his aim even as he covered the target. In that lost instant, the Duster saw him. He had time to jerk his machine gun around in a new direction. he had time to gape his mouth wide open. Then Radway shot him through the hips, and leaped right in.
There is nothing terribly original here. It’s a fairly standard tough story in the pulp vein, well enough written and competently plotted by one of the masters of the form.
It’s a tightly written book, slick and fast moving, the plot a fairly familiar one often used in that era (both in The Secret Six (MGM, 1931) and Leslie Charteris’s The Saint in New York, and Raoul Whitfield used the big game hunter angle in Killer’s Carnival written as Temple Field), but it’s well handled here, and it touches on the classical references common to Brand’s work (here Radway playing at Theseus negotiating a labyrinth of lies).
Still, it’s prime Brand and well worth the time it takes to read. It may lack that word savagery that marks the best ofBlack Mask or Dime Detective, but it’s fast paced, fun, and a reminder of that special quality that made Max Brand one of the most successful writers of all time.
Brand did somewhat better with The Night Flower (Macauley, 1936, as Walter C. Butler), another of his tough crime novels, but Big Game is well worth looking for. Even if you find you’re more than a few steps ahead of the hero and the writer in terms of the plot, it moves at an action-packed pace, and Brand keeps the big revelation hidden right down to the wire; in the true pulp tradition you can’t ask for much more than that.
SINGLE-HANDED. Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ), Ireland. TV mini-series: 1-2 Jan 2007; 1-2 Jan 2008; 12-13 Apr 2009. Owen McDonnell, Ruth McCabe, David Herlihy, Briain Gleeson, Ian McElhinney, Marcella Plunkett.
This is an Irish production that has just been shown here in England as a three part series, but, checking the Internet, I find that it was original broadcast in Ireland at one episode a year, two parts each, from 2007 to 2009
Jack Driscoll is a sergeant in the Irish police force who has moved back to the rural and sparsely populated west of the country where he becomes effectively a one man force (hence the title) though he has a helper and a superior turns up from time to time. (Jack’s the one on the left in the photo.)
He has taken over from his father but as his investigation into the death of young female immigrant proceeds he finds that the squeaky-clean reputation that his father holds is, in reality, somewhat blemished. In the second episode this story comes to a head and in the third an old flame, and former colleague, comes to the area as part of an operation.
This was an intriguing series with an intriguing setting and with very bleak story lines. It is well worth watching and I would recommend watching them in the order of production as the consequences of each programme are evident in the next.
MARGERY ALLINGHAM – Tether’s End. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1958. First published in the UK as Hide My Eyes: Chatto & Windus, hardcover, 1958. Also published in the US as Ten Were Missing: Dell, 1961. Other US paperback editions include Macfadden-Bartell, 1970; Bantam, 1983.
Allingham creates a tremendously creepy, cozy-strange atmosphere in the neighborhood around a tiny London square, and a creepy, colorful murderer to match, but this is not up to Allingham’s standard.
Campion is barely present, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but the crime is solved in large part by Campion and various police officers (who are impossible to tell apart) practicing amateur psychology that doesn’t make a lick of sense.
THE TOUGHEST MAN ALIVE. Allied Artists, 1955. Dane Clark, Lita Milan, Anthony Caruso, Ross Elliott. Screenplay: Steve Fisher. Director: Sidney Salkow.
When it comes down to it, all things considered, they couldn’t have made a better choice to play the title character than Dane Clark. Short, wiry, but not overly pugnacious, he still carried himself in all of the films he made as if he had a chip on his shoulder, one that he all but asked anyone who crossed his path to knock off.
To nab a gang of crooks who’ve been stealing US government munitions and selling them to the highest bidder on the open market, Dane Clark as agent Lee Stevens goes underground, posing as the notorious soldier-of-fortune (and all around bad guy) Pete Gore (Anthony Caruso) to make contact with the gang.
And where is Pete Gore? Locked up in some Latin American prison, and of course we all know what’s going to happen down there. Stevens’ means of tracking down the high honcho of gang is Lida Velasco (the statuesque Lita Milan, who later married Ramfis Trujillo, the son of the well-known Dominican Republic dictator). Lida herself is the daughter of a recently deposed banana republic dictator, and she needs guns to overthrow the current regime.
That about sums it up, except for agent Cal York (Ross Elliott), Stevens’ primary contact with his own office. Once it’s known that his buddy is happily married, we know how that particular sidebar of the story is going to work out. Actually we pretty much how the entire story is going to end up, once it’s properly underway.
BRIAN FLYNN – The Billiard-Room Mystery. Macrae Smith, US, hardcover, 1929. Originally published in the UK by John Hamilton, hardcover, 1927.
It is Cricket Week at Considine Manor. Gathered there are the friends of the son of Sir Charles Considine, and among them is Anthony Bathurst. Bathurst at this point had done no detecting — this is the first novel in which he appears — but he believes he’d be good at it. His opportunity arises when one of the cricketers is found dead in the billiard room, strangled and then stabbed.
The regular policeman is beyond his depth, and even Bathurst struggles for a while putting the clues together. Not quite fair play here, I’d contend, and the writing is Boys’ Own Paper style for the most part, but it is an adequate first effort close on the heels of a similar and certainly a more famous novel written two years earlier by another mystery novelist.
One does wonder how much influence was wielded by that earlier novel, but Flynn, let’s face it, does not come close to his predecessor.
An interesting sidelight is Bathurst’s comments on fictional detectives. Like Sherlock Holmes, Bathurst has great contempt for Lecoq, although he admits that Poe’s Dupin wasn’t so bad. When asked if he thinks Holmes stands alone, Bathurst replies:
“Not altogether … Mason’s M. Hanaud, Bentley’s Trent, Milne’s Mr Gillingham, and, to a lesser degree perhaps, Agatha Christie’s M. Poirot are all excellent in their way, but oh! — the many dozens that aren’t.”
Someone mentions Bernard Capes’ “Baron” of The Skeleton Key — regrettably unknown to me — G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, and H. C. Bailey’s Reginald Fortune. Bathurst responds:
“I am willing to accept two,” said Anthony, “but Father Brown — no. He’s too entirely ‘Chestertonian.’ He deduces that the dustman was the murderer because of the shape of the piece that had been cut from the apple pie. I can’t quite get him.”
Even keeping in mind that Bathurst was talking about detectives who reason, it is a commentary on such judgments that he gave the lowest ratings to the two — Poirot and Father Brown — who remain popular today. Still, how many of us, asked for our own preferences, would do as well after sixty years had passed?
Let me be frank: I’m still flogging the apparently moribund carcasses of Bailey, Ellery Queen, and S. S. Van Dine.
– From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 13, No. 3, Summer 1992.
Editorial Comment: Mystery readers on this side of the Atlantic may be surprised to learn that Anthony Bathurst and author Brian Flynn combined on well over 50 (fictional) murder cases solved by the former and chronicled by the latter. Only a small handful were published in this country. For a complete list, see my review of The Sharp Quillet posted here, earlier on this blog.
Does anyone recognize the famous novel by another writer that Bill refers to at the end of the second paragraph?
TRIAL MARRIAGE. Columbia, 1929. Norman Kerry, Jason Robards, Sr., Sally Eilers, Thelma Todd, Charles Clary. Director: Erie C. Kenton. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.
Constance Bannister (Sally Eilers), a vivacious party girl, engages in a trial marriage contract with the reserved Dr. Thorvald Ware. When she slips out to a party while her husband is at work, he dissolves the contract, then marries her conniving sister Grace (Thelma Todd), who’s been scheming to ensnare Thorvald for herself.
The film opens with a lively party scene, highlighted by a black bottom dance by Eilers, an eye-catching performance that clearly intrigues Thorvald but, at the same time, makes him a bit wary of the high-living Constance.
The subsequent drama of rupture and eventual reconciliation is enhanced by first-rate acting and direction, making this a period piece that still charms. The sentimental twist that finally reunites the couple is the only major flaw in an otherwise engrossing period piece that retains much of its original charm and poignancy.
If you want a really scary story or two… or more… you have to go to the masters, the inspired hacks who made a living off cheap thrills. Fredric Brown’s short-short stories (some only a page or two) collected in Honeymoon in Hell and Nightmares and Geezenstacks (Bantam, 1958 and 1961, respectively) aren’t all that great taken individually — though some are quite nice indeed.
Brown can find pathos in a dinosaur and horror in three feet of water — but read as a whole, they have an effect like the Rubaiyat, sort of an extended meditation on fates already writ, that set me to thinking of things unhallowed.
So I picked up Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper(Belmont, 1962) a collection of the best of Robert Bloch’s stories from Weird Tales. I hadn’t read these since grade school, when they kept me up all night, and I have to say they still pack a creepy punch.
In the wisdom of my advancing years, I was able to sit back and admire the way Bloch — a lean and hungry writer in those days –could shift voices, writing sometimes in victorian academic, sometimes in modern hard-boiled or omniscient 3rd person … whatever it took to hone the story at hand to a sharp, unsettling edge.
Besides the title tale, there are such classics here as “The House of the Hatchet,” “Beetles,” and “The Faceless God,” all guaranteed to keep you up at night.
