NUMB3RS. CBS. Two episodes: “Jacked.” Season 5, Episode 12. First broadcast: 16 January 2009. “Con Job.” Season 6, Episode 9. First broadcast: 20 November 2009. Regular cast members: Rob Morrow (FBI agent Don Eppes), David Krumholtz (math genius Charlie Eppes), Judd Hirsch (Alan Eppes), Alimi Ballard (FBI agent David Sinclair), Dylan Bruno (FBI agent Colby Granger), Navi Rawat (computer whiz Amita Ramanujan), Sophina Brown (FBI agent Nikki Betancourt), Aya Sumika (FBI agent Liz Warner), Peter MacNicol (Dr. Larry Fleinhardt). Guest star: Fisher Stevens (John Buckley). Writers: Don McGill (“Jacked”); Cheryl Heuton & Nicolas Falacci (“Con Job”). Directors: Stephen Gyllenhaal (“Jacked”); Ralph Hemecker (“Con Job”).
You might remember uber-conman Lewis Avery Filer from two episodes of Hawaii Five-O, reported on here.
Evidently the producers of Numb3rs felt that a brilliant but warped mind like Filer’s shouldn’t go to waste and used a similar character twice in the show’s final two seasons: John Buckley, an absolute genius at the con. Like the Five-O episodes, the results were a lot of fun.
It would be unfair to relate too much of what happens in these two episodes, since both are replete with twists and turns, crosses and double crosses and triple crosses, so minimalism will be our watchword here.
In the opening credits of “Jacked,” we see the following: “24.9 million tourists per year” / “128 bit encryption key” / “18 million dollars” / “4 hours.” All of these do come into play during the course of the show.
A busload of tourists has been kidnapped by a vicious John Buckley (Fisher Stevens) and his handpicked team. Buckley wants a ransom from the FBI, or he’ll start shooting people — and he proves he means it by killing one of his hostages at random.
But what lead FBI agent Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) doesn’t know going in is that he’s dealing with a con artist of the highest caliber — and absolutely nothing is what it seems.
Despite all the potentially lethal firepower the authorities could bring to bear in this situation, Buckley survives but winds up in prison.
Buckley turns up again in “Con Job,” which opens with: “3 gunmen” / “16 million dollars” / “26 hostages” / “1 con.”
Nearly a year has elapsed when a gang of heavily-armed criminals takes over a diamond exchange with dozens of hostages. The methodology this bunch uses reminds Agent Eppes of Buckley, so Eppes enlists his assistance.
Buckley admits he confided some of his secrets to one of his cell mates, including the diamond exchange takeover — and the security cameras confirm the leader of the gang is that very individual.
Working closely with the FBI — and ingratiating himself with everyone in sight — Buckley helps Eppes & Co. plan how to foil the robbery.
While he is suspicious of Buckley’s motives, Eppes seems to have a handle on the situation, but the truth is that from the very beginning — in fact, even before the robbery took place — things have been completely out of his control….
Some actors can steal every scene they’re in, and Fisher Stevens (born 1963) is one of them.
Numb3rs ran for six seasons on CBS (2005-2010, 119 episodes). The premise of using mathematics to solve crimes might be unique. Except for PBS’s Mathnet (“The story you are about to see is a fib, but it’s short. The names are made up, but the problems are real”), if anyone knows of other math-based mysteries, please inform us.
In a very imaginative job of publishing, Dennis McMillan Publications has collected many of the early pulp mysteries of Fredric Brown and published five paperback collections, at $5.95 each: Before She Kills, The Freak Show Murders, Homicide Sanitarium, Pardon My Ghoulish Laughter, and 30 Corpses Every Thursday, which contain introductions by William F. Nolan, Richard Lupoff, Bill Pronzini, Donald Westlake, and William Campbell Gault, respectively.
Each introduction limns a different aspect of Brown’s life and work. No, these stories aren’t quite as well written as Brown’s later novels. After all, he was a more experienced writer when he penned The Fabulous Clipjoint and The Lenient Beast.
Still, they’re just as readable, and what a joy to be able to read material from forgotten pulps of the early 1940’s like Thrilling Detective, G-Man Detective, Clues, Popular Detective, Ten Detective Aces, Strange Detective Mysteries, and Phantom Detective.
Homicide Sanitarium even contains Brown’s very first story, “The Moon for a Nickel,” from the March 1938 Detective Story Magazine.
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier,
Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989.
Editorial Comments: In all Dennis McMillan did something like 18 collections of Fredric Brown’s shorter work, including poetry and some non-fiction, most of them appearing after this review was published.
This is the first of several reviews of anthologies and short story collections that Marv Lachman wrote for this same issue of The MYSTERY FANcier. Look for most of them to be posted here over the next few weeks.
ALAN RUSSELL – No Sign of Murder. Stuart Winter #1. Avon, paperback reprint, 1993. First published by Walker & Co., hardcover, 1990.
I read this out of the library when it came out in 1990. It says something about my memory and the number of mysteries I was reading that I didn’t begin to remember pieces of it until and a number of pages into my re-reading.
Stuart Winter is a San Francisco PI, fallen from the lofty heights of the financial community (and marriage to the daughter of one of its big shots) because of his integrity. He’s a bird-watcher and a Scotch drinker, and describes himself as a “cleaner.”
He is hired by an Oakland socialite to find her deaf daughter, who has been missing now for six months. The family was not a close one, but the mother is convinced she would have heard from her if she was all right. Winter warms her that investigations often turn up unpleasant truths, but she hires him anyway.
I liked the book, and the character, quite a bit/ The supporting cast, including a quirky psychiatrist friend of Winter’s, a deaf friend of the missing girl, and the very interesting voice of Winter’s answering service, were nicely done. The portrait of the missing girl was also very finely drawn.
Russell writes well, and tells a good story. I didn’t believe, however, in the characterization of the murderer, and there was fillip at the end that I found both unpalatable and unnecessary.
All told, this was a good book, and Winter a worthy member of the PI ranks. I’m going to hunt up the second in the series, which I don’t think I’ve read. I wouldn’t bet any huge amount on it, though.
— Reprinted from Ah, Sweet Mysteries #8, July 1993.
Bibliographic Data: Stuart Winter’s second case was The Forest Prime Evil (Walker, 1992), but that was the end of his career, as far its having been recorded in book form. Russell also wrote two mysteries in a followup series about Am Caulfield, a former surfer turned hotel detective, then four standalone psychological thrillers and suspense novels.
Back when I was a teenager in Columbus, Ohio, one of the local TV stations seemed like kind of a slap-dash affair, particularly on weekends, when the station was apparently run by the town drunk and the village idiot, and anything might turn up in the afternoon or late at night, regardless of what was listed in the paper.
What did turn up generally started at the wrong time and, if it was a movie, came on cut to ribbons, flickering across the little black-and-white screen like a bruised and battered prize-fighter trying to hold up to the last round.
I particularly recall one Sunday when a Fritz Lang movie was supposed to start at 2:30 PM. Knowing how things were on Channel Six and not wanting to miss any, I tuned in at two o’clock and was treated to thirty minutes of silent footage showing a kid hitting a paddle-ball, followed by the movie promptly starting at 2:30—with the first thirty minutes cut out! Such were weekends at Channel Six.
So I don’t know if they ever actually showed Nude in a White Car, but they listed it in the paper every six weeks or so, always on a Sunday night/Monday morning at 1 AM, which was quite beyond the viewing grasp of the High School kid I was back in the 60s.
And I can best leave to your imagination the effect those wordsNude in a White Car in tiny print buried in the Sunday Paper TV section had on the fantasies of a tawdry youth like myself. Suffice it to say that the film became something of an obsession with me, and I finally found a DVD of it last year, nearly a half-century after those thrilling days of yesteryear.
Well, I wasn’t expecting a great deal, and I found the movie (titled Toi, le venin, which loosely translates to “You, Venom!”) rather a mixed bag, with an edgy, hard-boiled attitude, a fascinating premise and somewhat slack execution.
The premise: Pierre (Robert Hossein) an out-of-work “celebrity” walking the beach at Nice one night gets picked up by the eponymous babe. Following a dark-and-steamy encounter, she forces him from the car at gunpoint, then tries to run him down.
Well we’ve all had relationships like that, but Pierre is determined to repay the favor. He tracks down the car to an elegant mansion shared by two wealthy half-sisters, Helene and Eva (Odile Versois and Marina Vlady): both blonde, both beautiful and both obviously interested in getting to know him better.
Which is the one from the car? Well one has been in a wheelchair since she was a teenager and the other just doesn’t seem the type, so it’s Pierre who must get to know them better, then decide what form his retribution will take.
Up to this point, Nude has been tense, amoral, riveting and sexy. But it soon degenerates into merely sexy as Pierre literally dicks around trying to decide which sister he can trust and which one is a psycho who tried to kill him.
After awhile, even the sexy bits pale (this was filmed in 1958 after all) and all we get is a domestic triangle, with the attempted murder pushed way in the background. It all gets a bit wearisome, but I have to say the ending is a shocker that caught me off-guard, grimly poetic and just plain nasty, and it’s worth getting around to.
HACKERS. United Artists, 1995. Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Jesse Bradford, Matthew Lillard, Laurence Mason, Renoly Santiago, Fisher Stevens, Alberta Watson, Lorraine Bracco, Wendell Pierce. Director: Iain Softley.
As a rule, and I don’t have too many rules, but Number Five is that I don’t review movies I don’t understand. But every Rule has an Exception, and so does Rule #5. Movies about computers, computer whizzes and computer geeks I don’t have to understand to review them. I can even enjoy them, but not always.
Hackers is a movie that falls into the category of “I didn’t really understand the plot,†but I did enjoy it. A lot. The story deals with a worm and/or computer virus dreamed up by some slimy corporate security guy, but which a gang of high school hackers stumbles upon. And (with some travail but not too unexpectedly) they save the day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP6iTjhlOvs
There is a lot of symbolic nonsense about what you see on the screen when someone is hacking, or at least I think it’s nonsense, but what do I know. Psychedelic images looking very electronic, in other words, but symbolic in the sense that it’s maybe what the hackers have in their brains while they are sitting at their computer screens typing madly away at the keyboard.
The reason I could enjoy this one is that the gang of hackers, whose actions and life style may or may not be authentic, but which feels authentic, except for maybe the roller skates, is so much fun to watch – their competitiveness, their one-upmanship, and their comradery – along with a romance that begins with hatred at first sight.
Or at least what feigns to be hatred at first sight, but these are teenagers, and their hormones are all mixed up.
I’m speaking of Jonny Lee Miller (Eli Stone, to some of us) and Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft, to some other of us, with some overlap, I’m sure). Miss Jolie was all of 20 years old when she made this movie, and from the first moment she’s on the screen, you know that, yes, here is going to be star.
The computer stuff was outdated even before they finishing filming this movie, so there’s no need to go into any of the details, even if I could (or even if I could fake it), and here it is, well over 15 years later already.
You needn’t be for a minute concerned about that. If you watch movies for fun and entertainment, this is one for you. Even if you don’t understand what’s going on: the plot, that is – the unimportant, non-essential part. Rule #2: Know which is which.
DANA STABENOW – Better to Rest. Signet, paperback reprint, September 2003. Hardcover edition: New American Library, 2002.
I’ve never availed myself of the method, but I’m told that a good way to learn a new language is to immerse yourself in it completely — in a class or a group session in which nothing but the language is spoken, for example — and eventually, by necessity, you’ll start to catch on.
As I say, I’ve never tried it, but I’ve often done what seems like the equivalent. Such as picking up a new mystery series in the middle, for example, and trying to pick up on who’s who and why this one doesn’t get along well with that one, and why these two are an item but aren’t talking to each other at the moment.
Sometimes, though, it seems to take an awfully long time.
Such as with this one, just as a handy example. Stabenow started out as a science fiction writer, but after three books, she seems to have abandoned the field and has concentrated on writing mysteries. Her first series character was Kate Shugak, whom I think might be best described as an Aleut private eye. There have been some 13 books about her since A Cold Day for Murder, which won an Edgar in 1992. Better to Rest, to get back to the book at hand, is the fourth in her second mystery series, featuring Alaskan state trooper Liam Campbell.
Alaska being what it is, the two major means of relaxation and/or pleasure are alcohol and sex, or at least that’s what I’d have believe after reading this book, as Liam, his current love, pilot Wyanet Chouinard, and their assorted families and friends (and not-so-friends) indulge in one or the other (or both) throughout the book.
But they all know each other, and I didn’t know any of them. Some of them, by the time I’d figured out who they were, the book was over. Which is OK, in a way. Some of them I decided I didn’t care about knowing.
The lovemaking scenes are often free-spirited if not totally rowdy, and one of them is outright distasteful. On the other hand, the Alaskan countryside is definitely spectacular, especially with winter arriving soon. On the other hand, the slow decay of Alaskan life in the town of Newenham, with the imminent death of the fishing industries, makes for a rather melancholy backdrop to the mystery that has to be solved.
And, yes, there is one, or rather two, but a long-time mystery reader will get the feeling early on that perhaps they are connected. (Whether they are or not, I leave for you to discover.) The major one is the discovery of a wrecked World War II airplane in a nearby glacier, complete with bodies and a gold coin clutched in the hand of a dismembered arm.
The other is the murder of a sexy 74-year-old grandmother, whose death Liam takes very badly. There’s very little detection involved. On page 259 (or 293) Liam says he knows who did it, and so he does. It seems more like guesswork to me.
Educated guesswork, I hasten to add, since he knows and lives with these people. For the most part, though, reading about them suits me just fine. Alaska sounds like a great place to visit, but I don’t think I’d care to live there.
— September 2003
[UPDATE] 07-01-12.Bad Blood, book number 20 in Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak series, is scheduled for next year (2013), but for whatever reason, this is still the most recent book-length adventure for Liam Campbell.
