PHANTOM LADY. Universal Pictures, 1944. Franchot Tone, Ella Raines, Alan Curtis, Aurora Miranda, Thomas Gomez, Fay Helm, Elisha Cook Jr. Based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich. Director: Robert Siodmak.

   [Phantom Lady, based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich] is a handsomely staged but wildly improbable tale of an architect (Curtis) who is wrongly convicted of his wife’s murder and of his Girl Friday’s attempt to track down the real murderer.

   Curtis is, as usual, bland, and G .F. Raines overacts (something of a feat for someone with very modest acting talents), but Tone has some good scenes as a charmer with a flaw and Elisha Cook’s murder is well-staged. At its best, Woolrich’s world in which shadows seem to pulsate with threats and menace is splendidly captured in this uneven film with its uneasy blend of glibness and implicit peril. Woolrich can’t be beat for texture and atmosphere, and Siodmak and his team have managed to get some of that on film.

  ELIZABETH DALY – Death and Letters. Dell/Murder Ink #21, paperback, 1981. First edition: Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1950. Also: Mercury Mystery #165, digest-sized paperback, 1951. Berkley, paperback, 1963.

   It’s nice to see some of Elizabeth Daly’s work back in print again. Her books are increasingly hard to find in used paperback shops, and the demand for them is high, as Carol Brener, the proprietress of Murder Ink [in part responsible for this line of paperbacks], most assuredly well knows.

   And I’ve known it, too, for quite some time now, and yet I’ve never gotten around to reading anything by her until now. This book, written toward the end of Miss Daly’s writing career, was my introduction to Henry Gamadge, and do you know, from reading it I’m still not sure what it is exactly that he does for a living. Private eye work, apparently, but dealing primarily with bookish matters, perhaps?

   Which certainly doubles the appeal to mystery fans, most of whom are collectors and savers of one sort or another.

   In this case, a message via a crossword puzzle, and a Gamadgian response, with a little help from G.K. Chesterton, help spring a lady whose family has shut her up in her room as mentally incompetent. It seems she suspects something wrong about her husband’s “suicide.” One of the family knows for a fact there was. The others are merely afraid of scandal.

   At first Daly’s storytelling methods seem rather dry and aloof, more British in tone than American, but the effect begins to diminish as the characters and the proceedings start to sort themselves out a bit. The quiet little climax/resolution only serves to reinforce the obvious statement. Here is the ultimate antithesis of the Mickey Spillane school of writing!

“THE BEARDED LADY.” An episode of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates. BBC, UK, 3 January 1996. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Patricia Routledge, Derek Benfield, Dominic Monaghan, John Graham-Davies. Based on characters in the book Missing Persons by David Cook (also co-screenwriter). Director: John Glenister.

   The book Missing Persons itself had been adapted for television nearly six years earlier (30 May 1990), also starring Patricia Routledge in the leading role. It was the pilot for a proposed series by Yorkshore TV, but the project went nowhere until it was finally picked up by the BBC in this series and later shown in the US on PBS.

   This first episode begins with Hetty Wainthropp waking up on her 60th birthday, married but with no pension of her own, and two years short of qualifying for one. She decides on the spot to go to work, and while on the job as a postal clerk, she finds herself intrigued by the mysterious death of a local homeless woman.

   Assisting her (reluctantly) is her elderly husband (Derek Benfield) and 17-year-old Geoffrey Shawcross (Dominic Monaghan), whose street smartness gives the new private detective agency a dimension that Hetty herself, with an inborn curiosity and a knack for putting details together, soon realizes she is lacking.

   The characters are wonderful, especially Benfield’s puzzled reaction to his wife’s new vocation. He is at first vehemently opposed, but he gradually (and grudgingly) finds himself assisting, while his wife and their new ward go off detecting, using buses and the occasional motor scooter for transportation.

   As for Hetty herself, she’s what I can only call a middle class Miss Marple, and quite active for her age. Her environment is that of a midsize city, crowded and a bit rundown, with plenty of ethnic minorities (definitely unlike Midsomer Murders). No scenic villages or large manors for her. What ever the opposite of the word “posh” is, that’s the word I think would fit best.

   While the detection is fun (and more than a little dangerous), this first case is, in all honesty, not very interesting (something to do with mollusks) and worse, more than a little muddled. The ending came much too abruptly, before all of the loose ends had been tied up, or so I thought. Some of the accents were tough to follow, though, so I admit that I may have missed something.

   But it is the characters that make or break shows like this one. It went on from this first episode for four seasons, so the original viewing audience seems to have become attached to them fairly quickly. All quibbles aside, both major and minor, I’m willing to watch more of them myself.