January 2010


Reviewed by DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


THE KREMLIN LETTER. 1970. Patrick O’Neal, Richard Boone, Barbara Parkins, Bibi Anderson, George Sanders, Nigel Green, Orson Welles, Max Von Sydow, Micheál MacLiammóir, Raf Vallone, Dean Jagger, Marc Lawrence, Nial McGinnis, Lila Kedrova, John Huston, Vonda McGee. Screenplay: John Huston & Gladys Hill. Based on the novel by Noel Behn. Directed by John Huston.

THE KREMLIN LETTER

   Charles Rone (Patrick O’Neal) of the Office of Naval Intelligence, a genius with a photographic memory and a possible death wish, is seconded to a legendary intelligence operation with roots in the Second World War to recover the Kremlin Letter, a letter from a high ranking American intelligence officer promising the United States would back the Soviet Union in trouble with Red China, passed to a Soviet politician in secret talks with the West. Neither side can afford for the letter to come to light.

   The team is lead by the legendary Highwayman (Jagger); Ward, the smooth, cruel, and avuncular Boone; Lord Ashley’s Whore (Nigel Green); the cross dressing Warlock (Sanders); and Barbara Parkins as the daughter of an aging cracksman who has withdrawn from the team.

   After a nasty bit of sexual extortion against a Russian agent in the US involving his wife and daughters and lesbian seduction, the team is off to Moscow, where the complex game of cross and double cross involves them with Soviet counter spy Colonel Koskov (Von Sydow) of the Third Department who is being spied upon by his own boss Bresnivich (Orson Welles). Koskov’s marriage to the wife (Bibi Anderson) of a former agent who had been bribed to retrieve the Kremlin letter also threatens his future.

THE KREMLIN LETTER

   While the atmosphere of cross and double cross and the day-to-day details of espionage tradecraft are emphasized as in Behn’s best-selling novel, and the complex plot is kept as straightforward as possible, the film is curiously distant, and O’Neal’s Rone difficult to warm to.

   The suspense never really kicks in, and the real purpose of the deadly games being played comes as only a minor surprise to anyone who has been paying attention or is at all familiar with spy films and novels in general, despite the fact Huston had been involved with spy movies as far back as his second directorial effort, the under-appreciated Across the Pacific with Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet..

   For that matter the film is handsomely shot by cinematographer Ted Scaife, and Huston’s direction is as usual stylish and certain, if as distant as his leads.

THE KREMLIN LETTER

   Richard Boone is particularly good, though if you don’t figure out who he is within seconds of him coming on screen you aren’t paying attention. George Sanders has some fun playing the homosexual Warlock who is a cross dresser and likes to knit and uncovers Koskov’s former homosexual liaisons from the past; and Orson Welles has a few showy scenes as the Russian master spy as wary of Koskov as the west, who has secrets of his own. Nigel Green also has some good scenes as an amoral pimp and drug dealer who is a key figure in the spy ring.

   Behn wrote only two other novels, Shadowboxer, about a troubled agent who rescues prisoners from the Nazi death camps and finds himself caught in a double dealing plot involving the future of post war Germany, and Seven Silent Men, a caper novel.

   His non-fiction book The Big Stick Up at Brinks was the basis for the William Friedkin film The Brinks Job, and he wrote the teleplay for several episodes of Homicide. His book Lindbergh: The Crime offered the controversial theory that there was no kidnapping and the crime was staged to cover up the Lindbergh baby’s accidental death.

   In addition he was an important figure in the development of Off Broadway theater. He is one of the few American writers of his era to rival the British at the serious spy novel.

   The Kremlin Letter probably works better on television than it did on the big screen. O’Neal is a good actor, but he is too dispassionate here, and we are never allowed inside, a fact overcome in the novel by Behn recounting in detail the events in Rone’s past that formed his character and made him ideal for this deadly game. The scenes he has with Bibi Anderson are one of the few times in the film he shows any signs of emotion at all. For most of the film he only manages to look as if he is smelling something vaguely distasteful.

THE KREMLIN LETTER

   Even when everything begins to fall apart in Moscow, the film maintains a leisurely pace that neither raises O’Neal’s pulse rate or our own. It’s as if everyone is too cold to work up a sweat even about the possibility of torture and death.

   The Kremlin Letter is dark and grim, and deals with the dark side of espionage, where human emotions and desires are merely pawns for the greater games being played. Neither O’Neal or Parkins, as the only two humans in this inhuman game, involve us enough to become really concerned with their plight, however, or the moral conundrums they are caught up in.

   Even at the end when the real plot is uncovered and O’Neal is sent home with one last murderous job to clean up the lose ends of the nasty affair, it seems less a painful torment than a mildly troublesome detail. By this point it’s too late to suddenly inject human emotions in these puppets. Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Supermarionation creations showed more human reactions than O’Neal does here, despite some rather flashy and trite business by director Huston to bring home the impact of Boone’s last macabre act of sadism.

   Huston did a good deal better with his film of Desmond Bagley’s The Freedom Trap, The MacKintosh Man, a spy thriller suggested by the George Blake case, where a charismatic Paul Newman in the lead kept the film and the viewer centered.

   The Kremlin Letter is a faithful rendition of a good book, and I like the film much better than what I’ve indicated, but it’s a curiously distant and uninvolved film as unemotional and amoral as its characters.

   It may be accurate about the world of spies and counterspies and the Byzantine games played by flawed human beings in that world, but it’s as cold as a snow drift on the streets of Moscow, and a handful of colorful secondary characters and Boone’s showpiece avuncular monster, aren’t enough to make up for the fact the film has no emotional core for the viewer to identify with.

THE KREMLIN LETTER

Reviewed by MIKE DENNIS:


NIGHT AND THE CITY Richard Widmark

NIGHT AND THE CITY. 20th Century-Fox, 1950. Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers, Hugh Marlowe, Francis L. Sullivan, Herbert Lom, Stanislaus Zbyszko, Mike Mazurki, Charles Farrell. Screenplay by Jo Eisinger, based on the novel by Gerald Kersh. Director: Jules Dassin.

   From the moment you see Richard Widmark running through dark alleys in the opening scene of Jules Dassin’s 1950 classic, Night And The City, you know he’s totally screwed. If only he knew it.

NIGHT AND THE CITY Richard Widmark

   But such is the lot of film noir protagonists. Caught up in the backwash of their own bad choices, they can only hope to put off, not avoid, what inevitably awaits them. And they’re always the last to know.

    Night And The City, adapted from the 1938 Gerald Kersh novel of the same name, takes a look at the London demimonde of the era, where Harry Fabian plies his trade as a nightclub hustler. He periodically “borrows” money from his girlfriend to finance his big dreams, not the least of which is setting up a life of ease and plenty without having to work.

   Standing in his way are the sinister fat man, played by Francis L Sullivan, pursuing a personal vendetta against Fabian, and the East End godfather, played by the dark-suited Herbert Lom, whose intense presence fires up the proceedings every time he walks onscreen.

   This is truly one of the greatest films, not only of the noir genre, but of all cinema. Dassin’s direction is flawless, capturing perfectly the seedy filth of London’s underbelly, while telling the riveting story of one man’s misplaced dreams.

NIGHT AND THE CITY Richard Widmark

   Max Greene, the director of photography, is superb, never allowing the viewer to get comfortable. The expressionist look of the film is all sharp black-and-white contrast and angular shadows, and this, along with his off-center camera angles, produces an unsettling effect throughout. This is never more evident than in a nightclub scene, where a mirrored disco-type ball casts its little gleaming points over the oddly-lit club, bleeding into the office above.

   Toward the end, as Fabian’s reckoning approaches, dawn breaks over London, and suddenly the film takes on a pasty, grayish cast. By then, I felt like I was covered with dirt and needed a shower.

NIGHT AND THE CITY Richard Widmark

   Meanwhile, the stressful score of Franz Waxman pumps up the adrenaline in all the right places. As Fabian runs deep through the back streets of London, the music pulls you to the edge of your seat.

   But most of all, this is Widmark’s tour de force. Fabian is a complex character, driven by his own twisted ambitions, and beset by deep emotions. When he whines to Gene Tierney, “I just want to be somebody,” he injects a whole new feeling, a real truth, into that tired line that has been uttered by countless lesser actors.

   Widmark makes it all look so easy, so real, that he pulls you with him, deep inside Harry Fabian’s head and heart, as he’s sucked down into the whirlpool. Never again would he be given a role so challenging, showing us how he was so tragically wasted through his long career.

Copyright © 2010 by Mike Dennis.



NIGHT AND THE CITY Richard Widmark

A REVIEW BY MARYELL CLEARY:
   

PAULINE GLEN WINSLOW – The Witch Hill Murder. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1977. UK edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1977 (shown). Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, March-April 1978. Trade paperback reprint: St. Martin’s, 1983.

PAULINE GLEN WINSLOW

   Winslow has created a religious community, Siderea, complete with charismatic founder, Noah Hightower, and his Army of the Stars, mostly populated by young people. It has taken over Witch Hill Manor on the edge of the little town of Daines Barington, and threatens to overrun the village.

   The youthful leaders, angry because the town counsellors have refused them permission to erect another building on the manor site, see Town Clerk Richard Brewster as their preeminent enemy and send him threatening letters.

   Superintendent Merle Capricorn is called in privately by his old friend, widowed Rose Lavendar, who is engaged to marry Brewster. While he is downplaying her concern, a murder does take place and the Sidereans are the first suspects.

   But nothing is as simple as it seems. A number of people, both from the manor and from the town, are involved in some way. So is Brewster’s dead stepmother, Lucrezia, who has left her mark on his stepsister as well as on their home.

   This is a satisfying book, with considerable depth in its characters and an interesting display of contrasting environments. My only caveat is that Siderea seems all too obviously a takeoff on Scientology, and the sympathetic treatment of Siderea may or may not sit well with readers.

– Reprinted from The Poisoned Pen, Vol. 6, No. 4, Fall 1986


Bibliographic Data: Ms. Winslow has 15 novels listed in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Of these, six are cases solved by her one series detective, Supt. Capricorn, whom I suspect has been forgotten by all by the most dedicated of detective mystery fans:

CAPRICORN, SGT. (Supt.) MERLIN

       o Death of an Angel (n.) Macmillan 1975
       o The Brandenburg Hotel (n.) Macmillan 1976

PAULINE GLEN WINSLOW

       o The Witch Hill Murder (n.) Collins 1977
       o Coppergold (n.) Collins 1978
       o The Counsellor Heart (n.) Collins 1980
       o The Rockefeller Gift (n.) Collins 1982

PAULINE GLEN WINSLOW

LUCRETIA GRINDLE – So Little to Die For.   Pocket, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1994.

LUCRETIA GRINDLE

   One might imagine that Lucretia Grindle is too good to be a mystery author’s real name, but if so, one would be wrong. And since her first two books are decidedly British (with a bit of Scottish thrown in) one might imagine that she is from England, or Scotland, but no, she was born in Massachusetts and went to Dartmouth — a native New Englander.

   And speaking of her first two books, of which this is the second, both cases are solved by the strong, diligent police work of one Chief Inspector Ross. The first was The Killing of Ellis Martin (Pocket, 1993), then this one, then nothing. Until this year, that is, or 2003, when Grindle’s most recent thriller. a book entitled The Nightspinners, came out, complete with no Inspector Ross.

   The Nightspinners is quite a total change of direction, as a matter of fact. It appears to be a semi-psychic psychodrama about two twins who can communicate with other — and then one is murdered.

   As for the Ross books — no strike that, as I’ve only read the one, but the one I have read is a straight-forward detective story. One in which two married couples are brutally murdered while vacationing in a small isolated cottage along the English-Scottish border. Ross, who is vacationing in the area, happens also to be one of the last few persons to see them alive.

   Incidentally, for whatever it might be worth, the two women who happen to be among the victims are also twins, but so far as I can tell, this small fact has little or no bearing on the story. They could be sisters, and it would make no difference.

LUCRETIA GRINDLE

   The story is strong on both setting and atmosphere. I’ll chance it and submit you to a longish sort of quote, from page 48:

    Ross stood by the headstone and listened to the silence that ran down the glen. As his ear became accustomed, he picked out the slow and steady burble of a highland stream, a burn running its way down from the hills to the loch below. From where he stood he could see the roof of the Rob Roy Hotel across the loch. … Somewhere, the lane wound down [the edge of the outcropping of rock] and ended at the farm where Rob Roy had brought his family to barricade himself into the hills and fight out his life, the place where, not seventy-two hours ago, blood had been spilled again in a frenzy of rage and terror. Here, in the chosen place of a man who had lived and died by the sword, Ross strongly felt the presence of violence. It echoed back to him over centuries and again over days.

   This is a not a cozy, in other words, nor a murder that depends strongly on the domestic lives of those involved, one in which the circle of evidence circles in, but rather one in which the path of the investigation spirals outward instead.

   Ross has the instincts of a true policeman, however. Here’s another quote, this time from page 129:

LUCRETIA GRINDLE

    As far as he was concerned, every murderer left a trail; all you had to do was find it. Sometimes you did so through dumb luck, sometimes through common sense. Other times you never found it, but not because it wasn’t there. Then there were the investigations that resembled bird-watching: you sat in the right place without moving and you looked and looked, and then suddenly you saw something. The trick might be finding the right point of observation, or simply knowing what to look for. Most often, Ross thought, it was neither. It was a matter of recognizing what it was that you were looking at, understanding what sat before your very eyes.

   The very neat, dovetailed plot gradually takes shape and comes into focus for a instant or two before being allowed to squander itself into a rather inept made-for-TV-movie showdown with the villain(s) involved.

   Grimes tries to make amends with some pleasant jiggery-pokery later, but — the word I’m looking for is “uneven” — and with this second effort, we’re likely to have seen the last of the slightly stodgy but still likable Inspector Ross.

— June 2003

[UPDATE] 01-10-10.   I don’t remember this one at all, I’m sorry to say. It sounds as though I might enjoy it! Or parts of it, at least.

   Also of note, I hope, since this review was written, Ms. Grindle has written two more books, both of which seem to be criminous in nature: The Faces of Angels (2006) and The Villa Triste (2010).

THE MAN WHO CHEATED HIMSELF. 20th Century-Fox, 1950. Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt, John Dall, Lisa Howard. Co-screenwriters: Seton I. Miller & Philip MacDonald. Director: Felix E. Feist.

   Not all of ladies in film noir movies were sultry sirens who manipulated men around their fingers with their come-hither eyes. As Lois Frazer in this small gem of a movie, Jane Wyatt is as petite and innocent-looking as they come, even as much, say, as Margaret Anderson in the long-running TV series Father Knows Best, except for one thing.

THE MAN WHO CHEATED HIMSELF

   Well, make that several things. Margaret Anderson never smoked, or at least I don’t think she did. Nor did Margaret Anderson have a lover on the side – I’m sure she never did that!

   Nor did she ever kill a man – in this case, her husband – before he had the chance to kill her.

   Lee J. Cobb may be slightly miscast as Lois Frazer’s man on the side – for one thing, he’s several sizes larger – but he’s absolutely the right man to play a grizzled homicide detective who puts his career on the line to save his wealthy lover’s reputation, if not some time in the Big House, by dumping the body at the airport and covering up the crime.

   Pure noir, all the way. He has an itch for her that just can’t be scratched. And do things go well? Two guesses, or on second thought, make it one. It’s always the cover-up that goes badly, and there’s no exception here.

THE MAN WHO CHEATED HIMSELF

   Complicating matters is that Lt. Cullen’s partner is his brother Andy, a rookie cop just assigned to him, and brother Andy is nothing but persistent in following up leads and fretting over details and small things that just don’t fit.

   There are, of course, coincidences galore, as there always are in movies like these, and stupid mistakes that are made that make the viewer simply cringe inside. If I were going to pull off a scam like this, I’d sure make a better job of it – wouldn’t I?

   You may be wondering how it all comes out, and obviously for that you will have to watch the movie. I will tell you this, though. The final scene is about as perfect as they come, bar none.

THE MAN WHO CHEATED HIMSELF

[LATER.]   I have now gone to read the comments left by viewers of this movie on IMBD, and more than usual, I am amazed.

   Reaction to seeing Jane Wyatt in a noir movie was decidedly mixed, about half and half, I’d say, and I guess that’s understandable, but I thought she was perfect in the part.

   A large number of people also did not understand many of the twists and turns of the plot, and at least one wanted the ending to be explained to him. My goodness.

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:         


UNNATURAL. Carlton-Film, Germany, 1952. Also released as Alraune. Hildegard Knef, Erich von Stroheim, Karlheinz Böhm, Harry Meyen, Rolf Henniger, Harry Halm. Based on the novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers. Director: Arthur Maria Rabenalt.

ALRAUNE Hildegard Knef

    Perhaps the best film of that recent flurry of horror movies I watched was a much-maligned, badly-dubbed little thing called Unnatural (Germany, 1952). Or maybe it’s called Alraune; it was released under both titles and generally ignored no matter what they called it.

    Hard to say just what it is about this film that draws me so irresistibly. Maybe it’s the atmosphere of romantic depravity — it’s certainly not the choppy editing or the atrocious dubbing, though they add an element of dream-like unreality to the experience, particularly when the camera cuts from a scene filmed on some elaborate set or colorful location to one obviously shot in front of a painted backdrop — or even, in one case, on an empty black soundstage.

    Scenes seem to start and stop for no discernible reason: the film may come in on the middle of an argument or cut away before it’s resolved, yet it somehow still tells its twisted story.

ALRAUNE Hildegard Knef

    The story. Yes, the story. Well, in 1911 when Hans Heinz Ewers wrote the source novel, Artificial Insemination was a relatively new science, practiced only on animals, and ripe for exploitation by Science Fiction.

    Ewers became a major figure in the heady days of early German silent movies, and his story prefigures the morbid fascination with science and sex found there so often. Alraune tells of a woman created by artificial insemination (purest Sci-Fi back then) who has no soul: innocent herself, but compelled to drive those who love her to recklessness, crime and self-destruction.

    Well, we’ve all known someone like that. I think I went out with her a few times in College. But Ewers gives it to us in its purest form, and this film (the fourth made from the novel) relates it with a strange, syrupy romanticism: like what you’d get if Max Ophuls directed Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

    Like I say, I’m not sure why I find this so rich and watchable. Maybe it’s the patently ersatz innocence of Hildegard Knef (sometimes looking alarmingly like Eve Arden!) as Alraune, set against the relaxed depravity of Erich Von Stroheim as her creator: complementing rather than contrasting.

ALRAUNE Hildegard Knef

    But mostly I think it’s the rich imagery. The photographer of Alraune was himself a veteran of the German Silent Cinema, having worked with Lang and Murnau, and he makes this film a delight for the eyes as he picks out unsettling details in the background, or sets up a love scene in dark, sinister lighting.

    There’s a splendid final montage, dissolving from a dead figure to a withered root, which assumes the shape of a twisted man and finally settles on the image of one ascending the gallows as Alraune’s destiny works itself out. Pure abstract cinema and a film I’ll revisit.

Editorial Comment:   There is a three-minute clip on YouTube (follow the link) that demonstrates quite successfully Hildegarde Knef’s mesmerizing effect on a smitten suitor. A recent DVD of the film is apparently out of print, but copies are available (on Amazon, for example).

AARON ELKINS – Uneasy Relations. Berkley, hardcover; First Edition, July 2008. Paperback reprint: August 2009.

   If my count is right, this is the 15th in Elkins’ series of fictional mystery cases he’s handed to forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver to solve. The first was Fellowship of Fear, which came out in 1982, which means that both Elkins and Oliver are getting up there in longevity, in terms of series that are still going. (Elkins will be 75 this year, but to this date, he’s shown no signs of slowing down.)

AARON ELKINS Gideon Oliver

   As a quick side note before continuing, there were five episodes of a “Gideon Oliver” TV series that was on for a short while in 1989, as you may well already know.

   Starring Louis Gossett, Jr. (on the right), it may have been a program too far ahead of its time, as crime scene forensics are all the rage these days, or so I hear.

   The “uneasy relations” in the title of this fairly recent outing are those between humans and the Neanderthals, who are not known to have interbred, or to have even been able to. The book takes place in Gibraltar, where a recent discovery has shocked the world of anthropology – two bodies, that of a human woman in a Neanderthal cave, along with that of a young boy in her arms – a missing link, if you will, of a another kind altogether.

   There to delivery a paper on the subject, Gideon narrowly escapes death twice – the first as he’s pushed or he accidentally falls off the side of the Big Rock itself. (In completely non-appropriate fashion, I was immediately reminded of the “Beetle Bailey” comic strip.)

AARON ELKINS Gideon Oliver

   The second involves a defective microphone and a puddle of water Gideon would have been standing in. He scoffs at the thought that anyone with murderous intent was responsible for either incident, which simply put, means that he hasn’t been reading the previous 14 brushes with murder he’s been involved with.

   That the story takes place in Gibraltar gives the author the opportunity to describe the small section of the map that it takes up in quite some detail, and superbly done.

   There is also a lot of scientific background to be crowded into the book as well. The latter slows the book down more than the former, but obviously it’s quite necessary, as the solution to the case depends very much upon it.

   All in all, in spite of the evil intentions of someone, this is a rather easy going book, with a small bit of detection at the end to wind things up in fine fashion. Of course the solution to the case also answers a question that kept flitting in and out of my brain all the while I was reading, one that (metaphysically speaking) made the motive a lot easier for me to put my finger on that Gideon Oliver simply didn’t – and couldn’t, alas – know anything about.

A TV Review by MIKE TOONEY:


“The Name of the Game.”   An episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre. First air date: 26 December 1963 (Season 1, Episode 10). Jack Kelly, Pat Hingle, Nancy Kovack, B. G. Atwater, Steve Ihnat, Monica Lewis. Story: Fred Finklehoffe; screenplay: Frank Fenton. Director: Sydney Pollack.

   Don’t confuse this single show with the later TV series. The name of the game here isn’t fame but winning and losing at gambling, specifically casino craps.

   Jack Kelly plays an expert gambler who is down on his luck. Along comes Pat Hingle as an over-eager, impulsive Texas oil millionaire (he says he’s worth $10 million) anxious to beat the house at its own game.

   Hingle wants to win $200,000 and split it 50-50. Kelly agrees to team with Hingle as long as he does exactly what Kelly directs him to do. “I don’t tell you how to make oil wells,” Kelly informs him, “and you don’t tell me how to gamble.” Chafing at the restrictions, Hingle reluctantly assents.

   Kelly warns his partner that the odds always favor the house and that he may have to pony up at least a million to win that two hundred grand, but Hingle doesn’t seem to care. And thus begins a marathon bout of gambling, with Kelly having to rein in Hingle now and then. Director Sydney Pollack has one long-duration shot from directly over the craps table looking straight downward — a “God’s eye view” of the action.

   It’s a long, hard slog but Kelly and Hingle finally do clear two hundred thousand. Hingle, however, is hot to double his winnings. Kelly, reminding his partner of their agreement, says it’s time to quit. He’ll be expecting his hundred grand after Hingle cashes in their chips. Kelly leaves the casino to see a girl he has just met (Nancy Kovack) and hopefully extend their romantic relationship.

   But Hingle is angry, accusing Kelly of being a penny-ante gambler and not the “player” Kelly fancies himself to be. Hingle is determined not to give his partner his cut, even if it means a fight ….

   But that’s not the end of it. There is a fine little twist in the story near the end where Kelly learns a valuable life lesson in the school of hard knocks.

   Although under an hour in length, “The Name of the Game” has a movie “feel” to it. There’s some nice misdirection in the plot, and the performances are uniformly convincing.

   Trivia: Knowledgeable sci-fi TV fans will recognize several familiar faces here. Nancy Kovack starred as a temptress in one Star Trek episode. From the same series, B. G. Atwater (later commonly billed as “Barry”) played the founder of the logical Vulcan civilization, and Steve Ihnat was a psychotic starship captain who insisted on being called “Lord” or bad things would happen.

   In a minor but memorable bit part, Grace Lee Whitney plays a statuesque blonde whose luck with the dice waxes but rapidly wanes; she had a continuing role as Yeoman Rand on Star Trek. And of course Jack Kelly played the impetuous young executive officer of the deep space cruiser C-57D who is torn to bits by the Id Monster in Forbidden Planet (1956).

REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


KATE CARLISLE – Homicide in Hardcover. Obsidian, paperback original; 1st printing, February 2009.

KATE CARLISLE Brooklyn Wainwright

    First in a projected series featuring Brooklyn (“Kate”) Wainwright, a book restorer who, invited to a reception to honor her mentor, Abraham Karastovsky, finds herself a suspect after she discovers him dying and whispering “Remember the devil.”

    Marketed as a “bibliophile mystery,” this first novel departs from the usual bookstore/collector subjects to go behind the scenes of the upscale collectors’ world to show how artisans, with loving skill, return valuable books to the condition that makes collectors proud to display them on shelves with books that have somehow, almost miraculously, escaped the myriad disasters that can befall antiquarian books.

    Any collector prizes the restorer who can return books to their original condition even though, in my experience, the process can take what seems an inordinate amount of time, causing the always anxious owner more than one night of sleep broken by fantasies of books mysteriously disappearing or being engulfed in a sudden and totally consuming fire.

    However, none of these concerns need spoil the enjoyment of this well-crafted mystery for the reader who likes the bookish references and setting, and can appreciate the enjoyable mix of humor and suspense that make this the debut of a promising series.

Note:   According to the author’s website, the second book in this series, If Books Could Kill, will be coming out next month, in February of this year.

KATE CARLISLE Brooklyn Wainwright

THE BACKWARD REVIEWER
William F. Deeck


JEREMY LANE Death to Drumbeat

JEREMY LANE – Death to Drumbeat. Phoenix Press, hardcover, 1944. Paperback reprint: Black Knight #17, no date stated [1946].

    Whitney Wheat, Lane’s series character, is a psychiatrist who also detects. In this novel his patient, a publisher and we know what they are like, hears drums, apparently portending his own death. Attempting a cure through a means that I didn’t quite understand when it was originally proposed and still don’t when all has ostensibly been cleared up, Wheat takes his patient to the estate of Humber Jacks.

    An authority on Indian Drums, Jacks is a wealthy man with an income of $25,000 a month but who rents out rooms at $1 a night to tourists and makes sure he gets the takings. He also has an ill-assorted household. After Wheat’s and the publisher’s arrival, murder occurs.

JEREMY LANE Death to Drumbeat

    Since my consciousness was recently raised, I make it a point to avoid novels in which the county attorney is gormless or corrupt, and sometimes both. But it was awhile before the county attorney appeared in Lane’s novel, and I continued reading, though I ignored the politician’s failings — alas, such are the absurdities one encounters in fiction — to find out if Lane was going to make sense of anything in the book.

    He doesn’t. Oh, he explains things; of course, that is not the same thing as making sense.

    For those who are interested in such matters, the narrator of the novel, on an intellectual level with the county attorney, has the same name as the author.

– From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 13, No. 3, Summer 1992.



Bibliographic Data: The following checklist is taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

LANE, JEREMY. 1893-1963. Note: Dr. Whitney Wheat appears in those titles indicated with an asterisk (*).

    Like a Man (n.) Washburn 1928.
    The Left Hand of God (n.) Washburn 1929.
    * Death to Drumbeat (n.) Phoenix 1944.
    * Kill Him Tonight (n.) Phoenix 1946.

JEREMY LANE

    * Murder Menagerie (n.) Phoenix 1946.

JEREMY LANE

    * Murder Spoils Everything (n.) Phoenix 1949.

JEREMY LANE


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