THE RUNAWAY BUS. Eros Films, UK, 1954. Frankie Howerd, Margaret Rutherford, Petula Clark, George Couloris, Terence Alexander, Toke Townley, Belinda Lee, Stringer Davis. Screenwriter and director: Val Guest.

        BBC Announcer: Today’s Forecast: Fog.

   London in the immediate post-war years and well into the middle 1950’s suffered some of the worst fogs since the late Victorian era, some not only hazards to transportation, but killers that took many lives. This one isn’t quite that bad, but it’s bad enough. At Heathrow the airport is shut down and passengers aren’t happy about it, among them the redoubtable Margaret Rutherford who just won’t take no for an answer when told her flight to Dublin is canceled.

   What none of them know is nearby a master criminal known only to Scotland Yard as the Banker is planning to heist a shipment of gold bullion and use the fog to cover the escape.

   When news reaches the airport that the weather is clearing at a nearby airport they put on a bus for the passengers headed for Ireland, with relief driver Frankie Howerd driving, flight attendant Petula Clark assigned to help the passengers, and four in tow, Rutherford’s cantankerous old lady, gruff businessman George Couloris, meek little Toke Townley, and Belinda Lee as a young lady obsessed with the lurid paperback mysteries she is reading. As they set out in the dense fog, Flight Officer Terence Alexander catches a last minute ride with them.

   But what none of them know is that there is a fortune in gold bullion hidden in the luggage compartment of the BOAC relief bus. Or at least only a few of them know.

   They are soon lost in the fog, and then when they drive off the road they end up stranded in an abandoned village in a rat trap of an old pub. By then Scotland Yard has learned that the bullion is on the bus, but can’t find them. Howerd knows about the gold and has told Clark, but there is no one else they can trust, including Alexander who doesn’t seem to be who he claims.

   In fact almost no one seems to be exactly who they claim to be, and it gets even worse when some one fires a Sten gun at the them and seems to be throwing grenades.

   Though it isn’t credited on screen The Runaway Bus is basically a remake of The Ghost Train (1941), an old barn burner of a play that was filmed before the war.

   Both were comedy mysteries, but Runaway Bus has a broader sense of humor and a satirical edge aided by the excellent cast and Howerd’s familiar delivery. Both films are available from Sinister Cinema, and Runaway Bus at least has been shown on TCM.

   Rutherford as usual is in fine form as a veritable dreadnought of a woman, here with obvious romantic eyes on meek little fellow passenger Toke Townley, and veteran villain George Couloris always handled comedy as well as drama. Belinda Lee mostly looks pretty and none to bright with a seemingly endless supply of blood soaked paperback mysteries. Clark has little to do as the flight attendant, but adds a pretty face to the mix.

   Frankie Howerd was a popular comic best remembered for his role in The Ladykillers, in the “Carry On” films, and the long running BBC comedy series Up Pompeii! where he played the scheming but none too bright slave Lurcio in the doomed city at the time of Nero’s reign. His asides to he audience breaking the fourth wall were the highlight of most episodes.

   The twists come fast and furious and generally very funny.

   Terence Alexander was a familiar face in drama and comedy, probably best remembered for his regular role on the BBC series Bergerac. He was also the voice of John Creasey’s the Toff on BBC Radio.

   After the usual comic complications the Banker is revealed, and the bullion recovered.

   This isn’t in a class with the Ealing comedies or many of their imitators, but it is a bright funny comedy mystery with a cast of familiar faces (Stringer Davis who appeared with Rutherford in the Miss Marple films is also in this one) led by the always delightful Rutherford and a very young Howerd It’s one bus you will be glad you caught.

WHIT MASTERSON – Hunter of the Blood. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1977. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition. No paperback edition.

   A schizophrenic priest with a message threatens Rome with nuclear disaster during the Pope’s annual Easter sermon. Gus Gamble is the only man who knows that plutonium stolen from a Nevada nuclear fuel facility has actually been smuggled into the Vatican, but he’s frustrated at every turn by bureaucratic disbelief.

   Gamble is a priest working Las Vegas blackjack tables when he’s persuaded to reassume his former duties as head of security for the AEC. He’s what might be called a born manhunter, that rather unlikely sort of individual who can miraculously turn up clues that hundreds of other investigators have already passed over. Unfortunately his intuitive conclusions are too often only partially based on hard evidence.

    Masterson doesn’t quite succeed in arguing that one man surrounded by massive manpower in the computer age can be the only one to come up with the right answers, but he will cause a few palms to start sweating as the big boom approaches.

[UPDATE] 04-18-11.   I don’t remember this one at all, but since I gave the book a rating of “B” at the time, I obviously enjoyed it.

    “Whit Masterson” was, as we know now, one of Robert Wade’s pen names. The first few Masterson books were collaborations with Bill Miller, but when the latter died in 1961, Wade took over the name alone.

WADE MILLER – Guilty Bystander. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1947. Paperback reprints include: Handi-Book #65, 1947; Penguin Signet #677, 1948, with many later printings.

   Guilty Bystander is the second book by the Bob Wade / Bill Miller team, and the first of six featuring private eye Max Thursday. At the beginning Thursday is a down and out ex-private eye working as a house detective in a shady hotel and drinking constantly.

   His ex-wife Georgia, now remarried, comes to him for help when their son Tommy is kidnapped. Max must sober up and use all his not inconsiderable skills to figure out the confusing scheme (whick involves a million dollars worth of pearls) and rescue his son.

   As always in the Miller books, the San Diego scene is vividly done, and Max is a sympathetic protagonist we want to succeed. Max gets some help from Homicide Lieutenant Austin Clapp (hero of Miller’s first book, Deadly Weapon) and Smitty, an ex-madam who owns the hotel where Max works.

   It is a fine book that all hard-boiled fans will enjoy — Miller and Wade are excellent writers.

   Does the name T.S. Stribling ring any bells? He lived from 1881 until 1965, and in the early FDR years he was considered one of the foremost authors of the American South. Before that he’d written extensively for pulp magazines like Adventure, which in the mid-1920s ran five stories of his about Professor Henry Poggioli, an American academic solving (well, trying to solve) various exotic crimes while traveling in the Caribbean area on sabbatical.

   In “A Passage to Benares,” the last and best-known of the quintet, Poggioli was hanged as a murderer. But that wasn’t the end of the saga. About three years after his demise, and without a hint as to how he came back from the dead, he returned in a new series of tales, published in Adventure and other magazines from 1929 through the years of Stribling’s literary reputation.

   A few years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Store (1933), he was eclipsed forever as America’s Southern novelist by William Faulkner and the publishing world dropped him like a hot rock.

   I was a teen when I first discovered Poggioli in the supersized Ellery Queen anthologies like 101 Years’ Entertainment and To the Queen’s Taste and in a number of the annual Queen’s Awards anthology volumes of the late Forties.

   Later, when I began collecting back issues of EQMM, I found that Fred Dannay had reprinted a Poggioli story in Volume 1 Number 1 (Fall 1941) and had bought fifteen new stories about the character that appeared in the magazine between 1945 and 1955.

   Then I discovered that in his last years Stribling had corresponded regularly with that certified mad genius of 20th-century literature, Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967).

   Recently I’ve been reading Kenneth W. Vickers’ T. S. Stribling: A Life of the Tennessee Novelist (University of Tennessee Press, 2004), which amply covers Stribling’s correspondence with Fred Dannay (whom Vickers insists on calling a “young” editor even though Fred was about 40 when he began running Poggioli originals in EQMM) but says little about the correspondence between Stribling and Keeler.

   The biography nudged me to re-read the first five Poggioli tales, collected as Clues of the Caribbees (1929), and to sample the later tales from EQMM, many of them collected in Best Dr. Poggioli Detective Stories (1978).

   My reaction was similar to what it had been more than half a century ago when I was first exposed to the saga. In my teens I couldn’t make up my mind whether I liked these stories, and as I slipslide into senescence I still can’t. There seems to be something off-the-wall about every Poggioli story I tackle. Could his affinity for Keeler be a case of kindred spirits?

   Stribling often called himself a satirist, and it seems clear that his intent was to poke fun at mystery fiction’s virtuosos of deduction like Holmes and Poirot. Since the first several Poggioli stories predate the debut of Ellery Queen as author and detective in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), it’s clear that the polysyllabic literatus created by Fred and his cousin Manny Lee was not Stribling’s target.

   But his is such a deadpan satire, so far removed from, say, Robert L. Fish’s send-up of Holmes and Watson in his Schlock Homes parodies, that many readers don’t get the point and remain in a state of head-scratching puzzlement.

   As chance would have it, the closest to Stribling’s brand of satire that I’ve ever comes across is a brief passage from his buddy Harry Stephen Keeler. In The Steeltown Strangler (1950), an industrial plant beset by posters defaming its CEO is visited by author deKoven Blystone, creator of that brilliant Oriental sleuth Sharley Shang.

   Blystone claims that he can provide a thumbnail description of each of the twenty linemen suspects if given their nicknames. In Chapter VII of the novel he proceeds to do just that. Offered the monicker of Strumberries, Blystone describes him as “A Greek with an unpronounceable name, but blue-eyed instead of brown.”

   â€œHow — how do you know that Smyro Smyroyannis has got blue eyes?” “If he had brown ones,” Blystone replies, “He’d have gotten called Zupp.”

   Chapter VII of The Steeltown Strangler is chock-a-block with off-the-wall reasoning like this — which strikes me as close cousin to the off-the-wall stuff in the Poggioli stories.

   The affinity between Stribling and Keeler — each man highly regarded for a short while and then so completely forgotten neither could find a U.S. publisher for anything they wrote — runs deep.

   This column wasn’t intended to end here. I had planned to say more about some of the oddball events one finds in Stribling — for example, a man being put on trial for murder the same day he’s arrested.

   I also wanted to discuss “The Mystery of the Paper Wad” (EQMM, July 1946), where Poggioli reveals at the denouement that two men, languishing in adjoining jail cells because they couldn’t afford to pay their estranged wives’ alimony judgments, had made a deal whereby each would kill the other’s spouse.

   This may well have been Patricia Highsmith’s inspiration for the murder-swapping scheme in Strangers on a Train (1950).

   What kept me from finishing this column as I had planned was that late in the evening of Sunday, March 6, my own Patricia died, very suddenly and unexpectedly. The death certificate gives the cause as sepsis, with pneumonia and stress-induced cardiomyopathy as contributing causes.

   She never even knew she had pneumonia. A few weeks earlier she’d been suffering from what she took to be flu but she was, or at least seemed to be, completely over it, so much so that on Thursday the 3rd she’d put in nine hours of hard labor at the cat shelter where she volunteered one day a week.

   She was fine on Friday the 4th also but started to feel ill that evening. From then on it was horrible: all night Friday, all day Saturday, all Saturday night. She refused to let me take her to the emergency room, saying hospitals never do anything on weekends but charge people.

   Patty had been terrified of hospitals ever since her mother died in one after going in for something minor. At dawn on Sunday morning, the 6th, I made her go with me. She must have felt as if I were driving her in a tumbril to the guillotine.

   A few hours later her internist told me that I had done the right thing and probably saved her life. In the emergency room I was told that she was having a heart attack right then and there but the medical people later changed their minds. She was taken to the cardiac catheterization lab where all sorts of tubes were stuck into her and all sorts of shots given to her but her blood pressure was so low that they were afraid to give her anything to relieve her pain.

   Late that afternoon they told me to go home and come back in the morning, saying that she’d need to stay in the hospital for a week to ten days. That night, around 11:00 P.M., they called and told me to get out there at once: she had taken a turn for the worse. I had her health directive and showed it to them and there the story ends. She died about half an hour before midnight.

   Our coming together, late in the 1970s, was almost a mathematical progression. First she had read my stories in EQMM, then she’d discovered from an article about me in the Post-Dispatch that I was a St. Louisan too, then we were introduced.

   At that time she was living in suburban Webster Groves with three cats, a dog and a black spider monkey named Tar Baby. I had never heard of a domesticated monkey before and began reading literature from the Simian Society of America, of which Patty was an officer.

   The result was “Black Spider,” which first appeared in EQMM (August 1979) and was later translated into several languages.

   I named my fictional monkey after the real one, and whenever I received a copy of the story in another language the first thing I looked for was what the translator had done with the monk’s name, which is meaningless outside the U.S.

   In Spanish she became Azabache, which means black as coal. The Japanese simply transliterated the syllables, turning the name into gibberish. That story would never have been written if I hadn’t met Patty and Tar Baby. It may be the foremost monkey mystery in the genre — mainly because there are no others.

   I’ve often said that TB wasn’t a monkey but Patty’s daughter by an earlier marriage. They were as close as a mother and daughter, and she was devastated when her child died.

   Afterward all her pets were cats, and I’ve dedicated several books to her and whatever animals were our housemates at a given time. The last cats in her life and the last four-legged dedicatees of a book of mine were Rico and Squeako. If cats had saints, she would be St. Patty.

   Anyone reading this column has probably heard the story of Mr. Flitcraft and the falling beam as Hammett told it in The Maltese Falcon. A beam fell on Patty that Sunday night, and on me, and on everyone who knew and loved her.

BILL PRONZINI – Blowback. Random House, hardcover, 1977. Paperback reprints: Dale Books, 1978; Foul Play Press, 1984.

   As you may already know, this is the one that begins with the nameless private detective as he waits for the report on his lungs to come through. It is a tumor, he knows that now, but is it malignant?

   He means to sweat it out alone over the weekend, but a call for help from a friend takes him a short way out of himself, up into the mountains, to mix a little fishing with business.

   There are six men at the camp, and one woman, which is just the right mixture to provoke a murderous amount of jealousy and hatred, but how do a stolen Oriental carpet and a lone peacock feather enter in to it?

   Pronzini enjoys doing a tough-edged version of classical detection, and he may surprise a few who haven’t been paying close attention; but he adds something more — a rare view of someone confronted with and facing his own mortality, analyzing his life, comparing it with those of the pulp heroes he emulates.

   The fact that he, and others, still read their adventures makes certain their kind of immortality, and while I can’t tell you what the doctor’s report says, even without a name to call his own, there is a private eye who now can be added to the list of those who may in time be forgotten by many — by not by all.

MAN OF THE WEST. United Artists, 1958. Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur O’Connell, Jack Lord, John Dehner, Royal Dano, Robert J. Wilke, Dick Elliott, Frank Ferguson, Emory Parnell, Chuck Robertson. Screenplay by Reginald Rose, based on the novel The Border Jumpers by Will C. Brown. Music by Leigh Harline. Producer: Walter Mirisch; director: Anthony Mann. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   This film was chosen as an example of the films produced by Mirisch, beginning inauspiciously with the “Bomba the Jungle Boy” series, then in collaboration with his brothers in the Mirisch Production Company, advancing light years to the production of films such as Some Like It Hot, West Side Story, The Magnificent Seven, and In the Heat of the Night, garnering three Oscars for Best Picture, as well as numerous other awards.

   Mirisch had just written his autobiography, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, copies of which were available at a lobby signing.

   Mirisch was born in 1921, but the only concession to his age was the scheduling of his screening interview before instead of after the film. He was an engaging interviewee, with apparently total recall of his films, and the Cinephiles award was presented to him by George Chakiris, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in West Side Story.

   Man of the West was an early Mirisch film (and not a financial success), a dark Western in which Gary Cooper plays a reforned outlaw who, escaping a train holdup with two fellow passengers (Julie London and Arthur O’Connell), stumbles into the hideout of his former gang, led by his uncle (played by the decade-younger Lee J. Cobb).

   Cooper has to convince Cobb that he’s back to join the gang, which is planning a bank robbery. The climax of the film, the robbery in what turns out to be nightmarish ghost town, is an exciting and unconventionally shot shoot-out against what appear to be overwhelming odds for Cooper.

   There is something of an air of implausibility about the film (written by notable TV scriptwriter Reginald Rose) that may have contributed to the film’s failure at the box office. Nonetheless, the film has a fine cast and director, and whatever its shortcomings, it was still great fun to watch.

ELLERY QUEEN – Ten Days’ Wonder. Little Brown & Co., hardcover, 1948. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover & paperback. Film: La décade prodigieuse; French, 1971. Released in the US as Ten Days’ Wonder. Anthony Perkins, Michel Piccoli, Marlène Jobert, Orson Welles. Director: Claude Chabrol.

   I tried Ellery Queen back in High School and quickly tired of him/them because it wasn’t Raymond Chandler. But when someone hereabouts recommended Queen’s 1948 mystery Ten Days’ Wonder, I decided to give it a look.

   Well, Queen-as-author doesn’t exactly sparkle, and Queen-as-character never really comes alive on the page, but I found Wonder a pretty well crafted thing: something about a friend of Queen’s with a god-like father, sexy young step-mom, desire-under-the-elms, blackmail, blackouts and criminous suspicions.

   Given that Queen’s friend/suspect is a sculptor, the overall pattern of the thing (and hence the killer) is pretty transparent, but — given that pattern and the morality it references — there’s something sort of subversive in the way Queen-the-character keeps morphing: from sleuth to accomplice, from celebrity to pariah, then back to celebrity, all without himself changing.

   And there’s an odd sub-text flirting with the nature [**WARNING**] of a God who imputes our fall to sin. Lenny Bruce put it more succinctly when he observed that if man is sinful, the fault lies with the manufacturer, and Fredric Brown put it more sharply with the God-as-comic-punster ending of The Screaming Mimi, but Queen’s handling of the notion has its merits.   [**END OF WARNING**]

   In 1972 Claude Chabrol did a pretty faithful movie version of Ten Days’ Wonder; Michel Piccoli plays a suitably colorless detective (here a philosopher, but for the French it’s pretty much the same thing); Anthony Perkins is neatly cast as the unstable sculptor; Marlène Jobert the cute step-mom; and Orson Welles, in the fakiest fake nose of his career, simply perfect as God-the-Father.

   Like most Chabrol films, it’s thoughtful rather than gripping, definitely watchable, but damn! that schnozz they stuck on Orson; I’ve seen better noses on a pair of Groucho glasses.

HEAT LIGHTNING. Warner Brothers, 1934. Aline MacMahon, Ann Dvorak, Preston Foster, Lyle Talbot, Glenda Farrell, Frank McHugh, Ruth Donnelly, Jane Darwell, Edgar Kennedy. Based on a play by Leon Abrams & George Abbott. Director: Mervyn LeRoy.

   There is some similarity between Heat Lightning and the much more famous The Petrified Forest, but the latter came along later (1936) and the plots (in my opinion) diverge rather quickly. But if you’re familiar with the later film, see how much alike the settings are: Heat Lightning takes place in the middle of the Mohave desert and an isolated gas station/restaurant/tourist camp is miles from the nearest town.

   Two women, sisters, own the place. The older (and wiser) has a past she would like to think is forgotten (Olga, played by the efficient but rather glum and weary-looking Aline MacMahon), while Myra (Ann Dvorak) is looking forward to a future involving men and romance that she’s not likely to have, not as long as her older sister has any say about it.

   For such an isolated location, there is a lot of traffic that goes by, but perhaps because it is one of those places that a sign saying “Last Gas for 20 Miles” is the absolute truth. Some come in, add water to a radiator, gas up and have a couple of Cokes (for a grand total of $3.65) before heading off again, while others hang around for a while.

   The latter include a pair of fleeing would-be bank robbers — or make that killers, since at least one guard was killed in the process — one of whom knows Olga from before; and in fact they knew each other very well. Also staying overnight are two wealthy divorcees (Glenda Farrell, Ruth Donnelly) returning from Reno, along with their hardworking chauffeur (Frank McHugh), who on occasion is called upon to do other jobs as well.

   Criminals on the run, an old flame, and two rich women make for a combustible situation, and the 63 minutes of running time is almost not enough to fit it all in. This was one of the last movies made before the Code came into being, and while there are no overt sexual scenes, there are several times there is no doubt what was going on when the cameras weren’t around and weren’t rolling.

   The overall plot may be a little predictable, but not entirely. How will Olga get rid of George (Preston Foster) or will she fall for him again? The drama itself unfolds in fine fashion, with more than a dash of humor saucily tossed into the boiling kettle, figuratively speaking. The photography and staging are more than fine, enhanced by the equally fine remastering job done to the film before it was recently released on DVD.

   Recommended.

MIKE JAHN – The Quark Maneuver. Ballantine; paperback original; 1st printing, March 1977.

   Add yet another liberated lady to the growing list of female action sleuths we have seen recently. Her knowledge of karate helps save the lives of a pair of cops at the mercy of two blacks with automatic rifles underneath the Queensboro bridge and involves her in their subsequent pursuit of a Quark-carrying madman capable of bringing on World War III.

   What’s a Quark? Only a portable surface-to-air missile powerful enough to bring down the plane carrying Hua Kuo-feng, the premier of China, into New York City for a UN summit conference.

   Her name is Diana Cantardo, and she runs a pretty fair restaurant on 59th Street, but she soon finds that romance and adventure are much more fun. I concur whole-heartedly and hope that that won’t be the last we see of the delightful Miss Cantardo, truly a beauty with brains, as she tackles more cases with her new friend Lieutenant DiGioa, who is not as old as he first appears.

   I do have one gripe, though, about an ending that’s both too loose and yet too tightly plotted. See if you don’t agree.

Rating:   B.

[UPDATE] 04-15-11.   The Quark Maneuver was Michael Jahn’s first mystery novel, and it won an Edgar for Best Paperback Original in 1978. Nonetheless, this was Diana Cantardo’s first and only appearance in book form. I kept looking for a followup at the time, to no avail.

   In 1982 with Night Rituals, Jahn began a series of novels featuring Bill Donovan, head of Manhattan’s West Side Major Crimes Unit. Over the years Donovan has been promoted to Chief of Special Investigations for the NYPD, with ten in the series so far and the 11th due next year.

WARREN MURPHY & RICHARD SAPIR – Destroyer World: The Movie That Never Was. Unproduced screenplay based on the novel Created The Destroyer. Ballybunnion Books, trade paperback, 2004. Kindle edition currently available on Amazon.

   In the foreword of this book featuring Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir’s unsold spec screenplay, Warren Murphy explains how, when, and why they decided to write a screenplay based on their popular paperback series, The Destroyer.

   In the mid-1970s, after turning down Chuck Norris agent’s request for film rights (back when Norris was most known as a karate champion), Murphy and Sapir decided to try writing their own screenplay. The script shows their inexperience at the time with the movie business. For example, no professional screenwriter would include camera angles or instructions for the actors how to act.

   The script’s best feature is the Murphy and Sapir writing style that made the books so popular. Both understood their characters better than those involved with the 1985 film or the 1988 pilot for an ABC-TV series.

   Someone is starting riots in major American cities. Mr. Smith of top-secret organization CURE hires the Master of Sinanju to train CURE’s new lone assassin. The last Master of Sinanju, Chiun may look like a tiny frail old man, but he can walk up walls and rip apart steel with his hands.

   Selected to be CURE’s assassin, without his knowledge, Remo is framed and executed for murder. With Remo “dead,” Chiun trains Remo to become The Destroyer. Remo’s first case, if he is ever ready and willing, is to stop the madman behind the riots.

   Sadly, the script is a mess. The book begins where the would-be movie should have, with Remo’s “death.” Why is Conn MacCleary the focus of so much of the first half of the story? This movie should be about Remo and Chiun. Visually, Remo or Chiun or the bad guys should be in every scene.

   Most of the movie is over by the time Remo turns from jerk to hero and goes after the lame villain Buddy Bower, owner of a hamburger fast food chain, who plans to become President by creating civil unrest (his method for creating the riots would have been visually laughable).

   Murphy, in his foreword, wrote he thought what went wrong with the 1985 film Remo Williams was the lack of a Big Villain. A problem this script shared. Maybe Buddy Bower could have been a Big Villain if the script had spent more time showing him and his evil plan at work. Instead, the script had characters talk about the riots while showing such pointless scenes as the President deciding to approve CURE’s assassin, Chiun traveling on an airplane, and every detail of the frame of Remo including his trial.

   Why didn’t the script take the obvious path? After Remo “dies,” fetch Chiun, show more of Remo’s training and less talking, while visually establishing the evil power of the villain, and then send our hero out to stop the bad guy. If Murphy and Sapir’s script had followed that path, they might have created a Destroyer movie series to rival the 1970s Bond movies.