STEPHEN GREENLEAF – Death Bed. Dial Press, hardcover, 1980. Ballantine, paperback, 1982. Bantam Crimeline, paperback, 1991.

   If you’re a private eye fan and you haven’t yet discovered Stephen Greenleaf, then you’ve been missing one of the bright new names in the field. This is only his second book, and already, for all intents and purposes, he has the formula down to perfection.

   Greenleaf’s detective is an ex-lawyer named John Marshall Tanner. The scene is San Francisco, home of more private detectives per capita than any other city in the nation, Los Angeles notwithstanding. Tanner’s client is a rich man who is dying of cancer and who wants his alienated son found. Tanner is hired to find him.

   The son, however, is a leftover radical from the stormy Berkeley days of the sixties. He is also wanted by the police. The amount of money he would inherit is sizable, and naturally there are those who would also like their hands on it, which they would, were Tanner to fail.

   Tanner also has other irons in the fire. A crusading reporter who prefers to work incognito has come up missing, and the police are worried about an unknown underground organization rumored to be buying up all the guns and ammunition on the black market that they can. Tanner has to do some fancy footwork just to remember what case he’s working on at what time.

   I mentioned “formula” above. As any experienced PI enthusiast will immediately recognize, all these cases that Tanner finds himself working on are not separate, but one. As far as PI fans are concerned, however, the more complex the plot is, the happier they are, and Greenleaf has enough twists involved in this labyrinthine maze of conflicting emotions and desires to satisfy anyone’s cravings.

   The combination of mood and atmosphere is black: dark, ugly, and violent. The writing is solid — if anything, perhaps a little too solid. Take this passage from page 202, for example. It’s fairly typical:

   It’s a well-written, picturesque paragraph-sentence, but it’s not one entirely conducive to speed-reading. It runs — if you’ll forgive me — counter-commuter-wise to the flow of the story, if you see what I mean.

   All the ingredients of a successful private eye series are here. For my own part, I wish I didn’t have this underlying feeling that everything — what have you: the mood, the complex plot, the overly elaborate set of metaphors and similies — wasn’t just a trifle too calculated.

   Which is to say, if only I could get it into words, I continually felt as though I were being forced to admire all the great scenery going by — without ever being able to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Rating:   B plus.

NOTE:   This book was reviewed earlier on this blog by Marcia Muller. Check it out here.

CHAMBER OF HORRORS. Warners, 1966. Cesare Danova, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Laura Devon, Jeanette Nolan, Marie Windsor, Jose Rene Ruiz, Wayne Rogers, Patrick O’Neal. Written by Stephen Kandel and Ray Russell. Directed by Hy Averback.

   If you only watch one movie in your lifetime, it should be Chamber of Horrors.

   This gaudy comic-book of a film was originally conceived as the pilot for a projected TV series to be called House of Wax, with Cesare Danova and Wilfrid Hyde-White as co-owners of a Baltimore wax museum, circa 1900, who solve the grisly crimes on display in their emporium. When the result was judged a bit too intense for network TV, a few scenes were added and it was released as a feature film. Something similar happened in 1964 over at Universal with their updated version of The Killers, as the once-rigid line between big and small screen began to blur.

   The result in this case is hokey but fun, with an able cast and some dandy bits of business to delight the adolescent boy in all of us. Chamber offers splendid sets, lurid color and tricky camerawork to highlight the efforts of several perfectly-cast players: Cesare Danova fills his shirt neatly as the strapping hero, Wilfrid Hyde-White is his lovable old self as his partner-in-detection, Laura Devon (who would cap her brief career the next year in Blake Edwards’ Gunn) looks awfully good in a part with a bit of range, and Jose Rene Ruiz (billed here as Tun-Tun, his persona in several Mexican films) adds diversion as a diminutive helper. But the film really and truly belongs to Patrick O’Neal as a mad killer named Jason — think about it.

   Jason makes his entrance here forcing a preacher at gunpoint to marry him to a corpse, and from there on, things just get fruitier. Apprehended through the efforts of the Police (Wayne Rogers) and our team of amateur sleuths, he escapes from the train taking him to his execution by cutting off his own manacled hand and leaping from a bridge into a river where he is presumed drowned.

   But we know better, don’t we?

   We next see Jason with a leather apparatus attached to his arm in place of the missing extremity, being fitted by a sinister Oriental (Barry Kroeger, one of the slimiest bad guys of Hollywood’s noir days) with a variety of attachments to suit his sinister needs: hook, scalpel, cleaver, etc. and preparing to enact a baroque revenge on his erstwhile nemeses.

   Given a part like this, many actors would have been tempted to ham it up in the campy Batman style of the times, and O’Neal does give it a full-blooded (sorry) rendering in the classic Lugosi style, but he stops short of self-parody. When Jason has a victim in his clutches, O’Neal really seems to enjoy it:

         JUDGE: (Surprised) “But-but you’re dead!”

         JASON: “Yes. Won’t you join me?”

   … and when he celebrates his triumphs with a cigar, you can almost feel the nicotine rush. This is a movie villain in the classic style, one who enjoys evil for its own sake, and he approaches a fitting climax in a running battle through the wax museum as good-guy and bad-guy fight with prop spears, torches and battle axes, set against a background panoply of gruesome wax murders.

   In all, a film to savor, and I hope you do, but I should add that what they tacked on to turn this into a feature film is sort of absurd: the “Horror Horn” and the “Fear Flasher.”

   When Jason is just about to butcher another victim, a horn sounds and the screen flashes “So that the faint-hearted can look away or close your eyes” an announcer tells us in a prologue.

   Fine, except that there’s no gore and very little blood to be seen, and when the lights and noises come, it’s generally to presage a moment of almost tasteful metaphor: Jason swings his ax, the camera pans decorously away… and what was all the fuss about?

   Still and all it’s a harmless bit of fun in a film you shouldn’t miss.

From Good, the first album recorded by the Boston-based alternative rock trio Morphine:

ROBERT AVERY – Murder on the Downbeat. Arcadia House, hardcover, 1943. Death House #3, digest-sized paperback, 1944.

   Clarinetist Steve Sisson is widely respected for his great jazz playing, but he has lots of enemies. Early one morning in Fat-Ankles’s joint during a jam session, one of those enemies shoots Sisson in the head with the working part of an ice pick.

   The girlfriend of jazz columnist Malachy Bliss is arrested for file murder, she having had the opportunity and several good reasons for doing away with Sisson. Bliss, who is an even bigger toper than Jonathan Latimcr’s Bill Crane, begins his own investigation among musicians and the underworld.

   After Avery has constructed a quite good, but perchance not accurate, simile — “as pure as a seminarian’s dream” — his inventiveness is exhausted. A typical Arcadia product: interesting background, poorly executed novel.

Bibliographic Notes:   Robert Avery wrote three other mysteries, but all for the lending-library market. This seems to be Malachy Bliss’s only appearance, but two feature a sleuth named Joe Kelly, described by Bill elsewhere as a writer and amateur detective:

A Murder a Day! Mystery House, 1940. [Joe Kelly]
The Corpse in Company K. Swift, 1942. [Joe Kelly]
Murder on the Downbeat. Arcadia, 1943.
A Fast Man with a Dollar. Arcadia, 1947.

“The Deep End.” An episode of Kraft Suspense Theater, NBC, 2 January 1964 (Season 1, Episode 11). Aldo Ray, Clu Gulager, Tina Louise, Ellen McRae, Whit Bissell, Paul Langton. Teleplay by Jonathan Hughes based on the novel The Drowner by John D. MacDonald. Directed by Francis D. Lyon.

   Despite some of the more obvious sexual aspects of the novel being toned down considerably, this is a fairly faithful adaptation of the Gold Medal original paperback by John D. MacDonald published as The Drowner, and about the closest thing MacDonald ever wrote to a straight private eye novel.

   Lucille Benton (Ellen McRae) a soon to be divorced daughter of regional old money, has died while swimming on private property owned by her lover wealthy self made developer Sam Kimber (Aldo Ray), except, we, the viewer, saw her murdered by someone in scuba gear in the opening credits, so we are one step ahead of everyone but the killer when insurance adjustor Dan Walsh (Clu Gulager) shows up asking Sheriff Kyle (Paul Langton) about things like suicide. Things get even touchier when he talks to Sam Kimber at his office once he gets past Kimber’s protective Amazonian secretary Angie Powell (Tina Louise).

   It seems Lucille Benton was divorcing weak willed Nico Benton (Dan Barton) for rough tough sweet Sam a real man, and it also plays out Lucille was holding some $200,000 dollars of money for Sam he had salted away as emergency funds without telling the IRS. Now Lucille is dead, the money is missing, the IRS is hard on Sam’s heels, accountant Gus Hickman (Whit Bissell) has been nosing around and may have talked enough to get Lucille killed, and who knows where this Walsh character will pop up. Sheriff Kyle may know which side his bread is buttered on when it comes to Sam Kimber, but he isn’t so loyal he will keep quiet about just anything.

   Then Lucille Benton’s sister Barbara Shepherd (a dual role for Ellen McRae) shows up unnerving Sam with her resemblance and we discover Dan Walsh is no insurance man but a private detective she hired because she thinks Lucille was murdered. When Gus Hickman is killed suspiciously near one of Kimber’s construction sites, Walsh puts two and two together, but the only way he can prove his suspicions is make himself bait for murder at the same place and in the same way as Lucille Benton.

   Television had to tone down the novel considerably, Lucille goes swimming in a one piece and not skinny dipping for one thing, MacDonald’s sexual themes are kept to a minimum, and there is some psychosexual business that gets considerably trimmed, but all in all it is a good adaptation of a MacDonald novel that touches on many of his themes including the self made man versus corrupt inherited wealth and influence, the darker side of American business and its practices, adultery, sexual healing, and sexual frustration as a motive for twisted emotions and even murder.

   As always in MacDonald, sex as anything but a healthy outlet for adults is dangerous and destructive and nothing more so than repressing it or expressing disgust at it. Prudery and murder are never far from each other in MacDonald’s universe.

   There is really too much story for the hour-long format to let a lot of suspense develop, but the performances are good and the story moves along well. It might help if the teleplay didn’t keep revealing things too soon, but at the same time I doubt many people couldn’t guess how this was going to go.

   Although Dan Walsh is not the only private detective to appear in a MacDonald novel, he is the only one to be anything like the protagonist in one. You have to wonder if MacDonald just wanted to try a private eye set up on for size or what his motivation was since this could easily have been told in a more typical MacDonald manner with a more typical MacDonald hero. He had used investigators, police and Federal, before, but I think Walsh is his only private detective hero.

   Nothing great, but worth seeing for MacDonald fans. There is even an early James Bond joke when Sam Kimber says of Dan Walsh’s theory that it is as fantastic as “That Bond fellow, the one who is always fighting criminal masterminds, what’s his name?” It may even be one of the earliest James Bond references in mainstream television, or close to it.

   A good hour long entry in a usually reliable anthology series, and an interesting one for John D. MacDonald fans.

JEREMIAH HEALY – Shallow Graves. John Francis Cuddy #7. Pocket Books, hardcover, 1992; paperback, 1993.

   I’m on record as believing Jerry Healy to be one of the better of Chandler’s heirs. He’s one of a group — Greenleaf, Nealy, Lyons, Valin, Estleman — that are somehow linked in my mind as the wave of the 80s, though Lyons got a head-start in the late 7Os. To be honest, obligatory homage to Chandler aside, Macdonald and Lyons, with perhaps a soupçon of Parker, would probably be more appropriately listed as influences.

   Whatever the taxonomy or genealogy, he still ranks in the forefront of current practitioners in my opinion.

   Cuddy is hired by the insurance company that once fired him to investigate a claim on a murdered model. He accepts only out of sympathy and liking for the individual who was told to retain him, and has many questions as to the reason for it all. He begins to get an inkling when the father of the Amerasian model turns out to be a prominent gangster, and Cuddy finds himself walking a tightrope as his investigation takes him into the family’s past and secrets.

   The plot is not exceptional, but Healy’s writing is. He handles the characterization of his protagonist and his relationships as well as anyone, and better than many. His relations with the police are a paragon of realism compared to most of the field. Some of Healy’s novels I have finished with the feeling that this was one of the best of the breed; others with “just” the sense of having read a well-crafted, enjoyable example of one of the kinds of novels I enjoy most

   This was one of the latter, which is more than enough reason for me to recommend it. I do.

Often a warm-up act for folk singer Glenn Yarbrough, the psychedelic folk-rock due (Clark) Maffitt & (Brian) Davies made one LP in 1968, The Rise and Fall of Honesty. It was released on CD in 2010 with six bonus tracks.

JOHN SANDFORD – Storm Front. G. P. Putnam’s, hardcover, October 2013. Berkley, premium paperback, October 2014.

   Some of the reviews of this book on Amazon give it only one star, claiming that Sandford has sold them out, that he had someone else write it for him. This is based on the dedication, which is to Michelle Cook (now his wife) for her help in writing it and that she is now a novelist.

   Well, I can understand how other readers might feel about this. Many of them claimed to have noticed the difference in writing style within the first couple of chapters. I’m not at all surprised about this. I looked at the dedications that Sandford included in other books in his Virgil Flowers series — this is the seventh — and in them he thanks any number of other individuals for their help in writing them. What input that Sandford had in any of them remains unknown, but on the basis of the evidence, I’d say perhaps some sort of supervisory capacity, but little more than that.

   Virgil Flowers is the only agent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in the southern part of the state, his immediate superior being Lucas Davenport, the leading protagonist of Sandford’s primary series of “Prey” books, each with a two-word titles ending in that word. My sense is that Flowers was a recurring character in those books before he headed off for his own adventures.

   What the Object of Interest is in Storm Front is an ancient sacred stele, an artifact stolen from an archaeological dig in Israel and brought to the US by a local (Minnesotan) college professor who is dying of cancer. What makes it so valuable is that the inscriptions on it suggest Solomon, the greatest king of the Jews, may actually have been Egyptian, turning the Middle East into even more of an uproar of religious hatreds.

   So all kinds of people are on Professor Jones’s trail as well. Israelis, some of whom may be Mossad agents, Hezbollah agents, Turks, Syrian, all kinds of collectors of curios and other arcane objects, TV personalities, plus a good (and good-looking) friend of Virgil’s named Ma Nobles, who has five or kids with maybe as many fathers, a bountiful bustline, and — even though Virgil is investigating her in regard to some fake antique lumber scheme she is cooking up — an IQ of some 150 or more.

   In spite of the controversy mentioned in the first paragraph above, I read the book on its own merits, as I always do. The first 200 pages were fine. Very enjoyable, I thought. Lots of action, lots of sly humor, interesting characters. What are they complaining about?

   Unfortunately at 200 pages in, this was only the halfway point. There were still 200 pages left to go. This is the point at which I think the author lost control of the book. The humorous byplay along the way seemed shoved aside to concentrate on the story, which was spinning its wheels, going nowhere fast. The characters, which were so fresh and new in the first half, suddenly began to fade and lose their personality, and they became far less interesting.

   What really goes wrong is that there are simply too many characters, and as a reader, I began to feel manipulated when they began to pop up only when they were needed before popping back out again. To tell you the truth, I’m not exactly sure how the story ended, but without a scorecard, I’d long stopped caring about who the characters were, and what they ended up with.

   And at length the story did end, but in a strange anti-climactic finale that I found myself totally indifferent to. This is difficult to say, as it was obviously one the author had in mind all along, but frankly, it just didn’t work for me.

RUSS WINTERBOTHAM – The Red Planet. Monarch #270, paperback original, 1962. Armchair Fiction Double Novel, trade paperback, 2012; published in combo with The Shining City, by Rena M. Vale.

   This is the goods.

   I know I’ve used that term of incisive critical analysis before, but there’s no better way to describe a book packed with action, suspense, and characters just a bit deeper than they had to be. Call it Space Opera, call it Sci-Fi, but The Red Planet is an undeniably fast and thrilling ride.

   It’s also a bit of a murder mystery as first-person narrator astronaut Bill Drake describes the preparations for the first manned Mars expedition, commanded by Dr. Spartan, a brilliant egomaniac who seems averse to sharing the gory for what he considers his personal achievement.

   Dr. Spartan’s mania first manifests itself in a training accident that takes the life of an intended crew member. With no time to spare, the doctor decrees that the fallen comrade will be replaced by a qualified woman in the team, Gail Loring, and to allay outcries of moral impropriety (this was written in 1962, remember, when even the mild sex in the James Bond books raised eyebrows) she will marry him before take-off. Gail is a gal who knows her own mind however, and she decides Bill Drake would make a better husband-in-name-only — thus sealing Bill’s fate.

   The ensuing journey to the red planet (hence the title, huh?) is neatly done as author Winterbotham fleshes out the characters, throws in another mysterious death, and ratchets up the tension with personality conflicts till our party lands on Mars — which is where things really get exciting.

   Because it seems Dr. Spartan’s megalomania extends to his attitude towards the Martians: small but nasty plant/animal hybrids whom he regards as manifestly a lower life form who should be made acquainted with their new rulers. This naturally leads to a certain amount of bother, and the rousing finale is a pitched battle, rousingly-described, with the surviving crew members fighting for their lives as much against Dr. Spartan as against the Martian hordes.

   Winterbotham was apparently a very busy writer of westerns, horror and big-little books, and he keeps things moving right to the finish, in approved pulp-fashion. I can recommend this unreservedly to readers who like a fun, fast space adventure.

   The biggest surprise for me, however, was on the blurb page, where I read:

   â€œThe Author’s son-in-law is a member of the team developing the plasma space motor which is planned to carry men to Mars within the next ten years.”

   Did I miss a meeting?