Jazz singer Diannne Reeves, from her CD I Remember (Blue Note, 1991) —

GALLOWAY HOUSE. Pilot: “The Night Rider.” 1962. Johnny Cash (as Johnny Laredo), Dick Jones, Johnny Western, Merle Travis, Gordon Terry, Eddie Dean, Karen Downes. Story and screenplay: Helen Diller. Director: Michael Hinn.

   Two gimmicks are going on at once here. The first gimmick is the title of the proposed series. Galloway House was supposed to be an old-fashioned playhouse theater, complete with drawn red curtains and a emcee in full colorful regalia (straw boater hat, bow tie, suspenders), with one problem as far as I was concerned. The opening introduction was clipped from the version I saw, and the closing curtain and farewell remarks came as a surprise at the end.

   The second gimmick, as I understand it, and I had to hunt for a while online to discover this, was that each episode of the proposed series was to tell the story in songs and words, of a well-known country song. I don’t believe that country singer Johnny Cash was to be the star of each episode, but I haven’t found any online discussion about it, one way or the other.

   In this pilot (and only) episode the song was “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” one of Johnny Cash’s many hit songs. About half the show consists of the characters singing various country standards: around a campfire, at a saloon, and at a funeral. The primary story, of course, is that of a foolish young boy who wants to prove himself a man by taking his guns to town.

   Johnny Cash as the lonesome gunfighter doesn’t have to work hard to act troubled, regretful and sullen, but as effective as he is, truthfully he’s not much of an actor. Some of the other members of the cast were well-known western singers and stars. I’d like to add a special note of recognition to Karen Downes who played the saloon chorus girl, who sings “Skip to the Lou” in suitably sultry fashion. It was her only credit in either TV or the movies.

LUCY CORES – Corpse de Ballet. Duell Sloane & Pearce, hardcover, 1944. Collier, paperback, 1965. Rue Morgue Press, trade paperback, 2004 (shown).

   The first, and last, time he danced in his own ballet creation “Phoebus,” Izlomin went mad before its completion. Now cured, he plans to re-create his masterwork for the American Ballet Drama in New York City. This time he finishes the performance, but then apparently commits suicide by hanging himself.

   With the aid of Toni Ney, trained as a ballet dancer but who now writes an exercise column, Captain Andrew Torrant of New York’s finest investigates the circumstances surrounding Izlomin’s death and discovers a hotbed of intrigue and jealousy in the world of professional ballet,

   Balletomanes should appreciate this novel. I enjoyed it from the ballet aspect but found it otherwise lackluster.

Bibliographic Notes:  Lucy Cores has four entries in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV. Corpse de Ballet was her second, with Painted for the Kill (1943) her first, also a case solved by both Toni Ney and Captain Tarrant. These were the protagonists’ only two appearances; both books are easily available from Rue Morgue Press.

   For more on Lucy Cores, the author herself, follow this link to the Rue Morgue website for a long biography of her.

Hurray for the Riff Raff is an American folk-blues band based in New Orleans. The lead vocalist is singer-songwriter and banjo player Alynda Lee Segarra.

From their latest CD, Small Town Heroes:

CLEOPATRA 2525. Syndicated. Episode #1 “Quest for Firepower” and episode #2 “Creegan.” January 17 & 24, 2000. Jennifer Sky (Cleopatra), Gina Torres (Hel), Victoria Pratt (Sarge), Patrick Kake (Mauser), Elizabeth Hawthorne (The Voice), Joel Tobeck (Creegan). Executive Producer: Sam Raimi. Created by R. J. Stewart and Robert G. Tapert.

   I’ve watched only the first two episodes, so far, and I’ve surprised myself by how much I enjoyed it. I can’t imagine the budget was all that large, but the sets are colorful and flashy, the special effects so-so or better, and who knows where the story line is going, but so far, so good.

   Cleopatra 2525 appeared as the first part of the “Back2Back Action Hour,” followed by Jack of All Trades, starring Bruce Campbell. Thirty-minute live action TV series have been scarce for quite a while, but for some reason I don’t recall, they came into vogue again in the early 2000’s.

   In the year 2525 (based on the song, I assume), the human race has been driven underground in a series of caverns connected by huge shafts by monstrous machines called Baileys. Fighting these new overloads are Hel and Sarge, both female, joined by Cleopatra, an exotic dancer from our era who was put into suspended animation after breast augmentation surgery that went badly.

   Of course the women who star in this show wear skimpy clothing. There’s no denying that. That’s part of the appeal. But they are decent actors, and they look good flying through the shafts that connect one part of their underground living quarters to another. Cleopatra — very blonde — is a bit of a ditz, but that’s part of the design, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

   She’s still learning her way around in episode two, which also features Creegan, an evil scientist whom I assume will be the women’s main adversary through the rest of the series. Creegan may also be a mad scientist, since his clown makeup outdoes The Joker of Batman fame by a country mile.

   I probably won’t report back on future viewings, but so far the two 22 minute episodes I have seen (after the commercials have been deleted) have done their job and drawn me in very well.

TARZAN AND THE SLAVE GIRL. RKO Radio Pictures, 1950. Lex Barker, Vanessa Brown, Robert Alda, Hurd Hatfield, Arthur Shields, Tony Caruso, Denise Darcel. Based on the charcaters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Director: Lee Sholem.

   After the first twenty minutes or so, I was all but ready to give up on Tarzan and the Slave Girl. There was a lot of frenetic activity in the jungle, a few tribes running amok, and what not. But it didn’t seem to be leading anywhere in particular.

   But I’m glad I kept watching, because this entry into the Tarzan filmography turned into a rather enjoyable escapist adventure. Directed by Lee Sholem, Tarzan and the Slave Girl is notable for being Lex Barker’s second portrayal of our eponymous hero and actress Vanessa Brown’s sole portrayal of Jane.

   The plot follows Tarzan as he seeks to rescue slave women held captive by a jungle tribe that is suffering from a mysterious health ailment. Tarzan teams up with a somewhat alcoholic game hunter named Neil (Robert Alda) to both find the aforementioned tribe’s hidden city and to rescue Jane and Neil’s would-be girlfriend, Lola (Denise Darcel). It’s a lighthearted little adventure film that, while not particularly memorable, ends up being quite fun to watch.

ANTHONY HOROWITZ – Trigger Mortis: A James Bond Thriller, with Original Material by Ian Fleming. Harper, US, hardcover, September 2015. Orion, UK, hardcover/softcover, 2015.

               The rain swept into London like an angry bride.

   That may not be the authentic voice of Ian Fleming, but it is close, and not surprising the source is polymath Anthony Horowitz, whose accomplishments include many episodes of Poirot, the highly praised Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders series, the bestselling adventures of juvenile secret agent Alex Rider, several other juvenile series in horror, fantasy, and mystery genres, and more recently, the highly praised Sherlock Holmes pastiche, the bestselling Moriarity and House of Silk. Horowitz is the latest writer to tackle the Bond series and with more than a bit of success.

   Since Kingsley Amis’s Colonel Sun, written as Robert Markham, one writer or another has attempted to keep the Bond series going. (An earlier attempt by Geoffrey Jenkins, Per Fine Ounce, was never published and is a sort of minor grail for Bond collectors, and an original un-canonical novel, Jim Hatfield’s The Killing Joke is a mixed bag that does away with Bond decisively at the end.)

   Christopher Wood wrote two novelizations of the screenplays for The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker,which had nothing to do with Fleming’s novels, and about which nothing much needs to be said. John Gardner had great success in terms of sales, though popular as they were, his Bond was never quite Fleming’s (not surprising as he created Boysie Oakes as a reaction against Bond and was himself the anti-Fleming, a radical leftist ex commando/vicar).

   Raymond Benson was a bit more popular with Fleming fans as opposed to the movie fans, but again the authentic voice was not quite there, though certainly closer than anyone could hope from an American writer.

   All those books have and deserve their own fans, but they are none of them quite Ian Fleming’s James Bond. They kept Bond alive in print, and I personally enjoyed many of them, but they were never Ian Fleming nor did they really try too hard to be. They were instead what the publishers and the public seemed to want, a hybrid of the literary Bond and the cinematic one. In regard to that the Bond series has been lucky to be helmed by so many conscientious writers.

   The latest round of pastiche began with Sebastian Faulks’ The Devil May Care, which was interesting and certainly literate, but didn’t quite fit the bill. Jeffery Deaver’s Carte Blanche recreated 007 and updated everything, but while it was a good thriller it wasn’t Bond or Fleming — just a thriller calling its main character James Bond, 007.

   But with William Boyd’s Solo this latest series found its legs. Boyd, author of A Good Man in Africa and Brazzaville Beach, not only found an authentic voice that echoed Fleming, he actually wrote a damn good James Bond novel, more serious perhaps than any by Fleming, but an adventure that took Bond to Africa in the sixties to good effect. If anything Solo is actually better than some of Fleming’s novels while still clearly Bond.

   Trigger Mortis is the new Bond pastiche by Anthony Horowitz, and it takes a bit of original material by Fleming from an incomplete story from the For Your Eyes Only shorts he never finished that took Bond into the world of Grand Prix. From that Horowitz has extrapolated an adventure that begins just after the end of Goldfinger.

   Bond is in London living with Pussy Galore who he has successfully kept out of prison, but things are deteriorating between them and domesticity doesn’t really suit either of them very well. There is a nice observation by Horowitz when Bond recalls introducing her to a friend in London and recognizing just how puerile her name was outside of one of his exotic adventures.

   Bond’s discomfort and self-recognition are something sadly missing from many Bond pastiche, but part of the authentic Fleming Bond. Both Boyd and Horowitz recognize that the Bond books are not individual adventure or suspense novels, but a saga, part of a very personal evolving fantasy auto biography by Fleming much the same way John D. MacDonald used the Travis McGee novels or Raymond Chandler used Philip Marlowe as more than simply a series about a continuing character.

   Bond will be saved from the ‘soft arms of the good life’ by a mission that puts him on the Grand Prix circuit, pits him against SMERSH and the mad bad and dangerous Korean Sin Jai Seong, aka Jason Sin, and he finds himself in the arms of the intriguing and all too self-aware Jeopardy Lane. It seems Smersh has been enlisted to help along the Russian entry in the Grand Prix stakes, and Bond is sent to foil their plans, but not before he saves Pussy Galore from the same gold plated fate of Jill Masterson in Goldfinger. Eventually the trail takes him from the Tyrol to a bomb laden train racing beneath New York with the intent of laying waste to most of Manhattan.

   Best of all is a nice little snipe at the film Dr. No (the book properly is Doctor No) when Bond discovers plans for an American rocket in Sin’s office and is told about any Smersh plans to sabotage American rockets: “… suppose he did manage to blow up a couple of rockets. Would it really make all that much of a difference? The Americans are managing perfectly well without him. Last January they fired off a Thor rocket. It managed all of nine inches before it fell in two and blew up.”

   A well-stated reminder of our space program late in the Eisenhower administration when this takes place — in terms of the timeline of the books: Doctor No takes place in about 1958 and Goldfinger in 1959.

   What is surprising here, and in Boyd’s Solo, is that the books read like an undiscovered Fleming and not a pastiche. Boyd and Horowitz capture the feel and the authentic Fleming effect in a way none of the previous writers have, and it is the Bond of the books and not the films, a mistake made by all of the previous pastichers, who tried too hard to split the difference between the two.

   Either book could have been written at the height of Fleming’s powers the way the best Holmes pastiche sometimes rises to echo Doyle or Robert B. Parker’s authentic sounding continuations of Raymond Chandler sounded so much like Marlowe.

    Trigger Mortis is not only good Bond, it is good Fleming, not surprising since Horowitz’s Alex Rider books are canny takes on the Bond novels themselves. Solo and Trigger Mortis are not Ian Fleming, but they have the feel and at times the voice of Ian Fleming without ever simply imitating his work, and far and away mark the first time fans of the books have reason to truly celebrate Bond pastiche.

   I’m not sure if fans of the films or of the Gardner or Benson Bond’s will be entirely happy with these, but they are the closest thing to finding a pair of lost Fleming novels available and that is as high a praise as admirers of the original Bond novels and Ian Fleming can deliver. This is not the Connery, Moore, Lazenby, Dalton, Brosnan, or Craig Bond, but the Fleming Bond.

   Of all the Bond pastiche written since Fleming’s sudden death at the hands of the ‘iron crab’ on that golf course, these are the first two I would happily include as authentic Bond novels since Amis’s imperfect Colonel Sun.

   They are, as advertised, James Bond Thrillers, and for some of us that is exactly what we have been missing for far too many seasons in the past, not books about a character called James Bond, but books about James Bond. There is a subtle difference there, but fans of the authentic Ian Fleming James Bond will know exactly what I mean.

SARA PARETSKY – Guardian Angel. V. I. Warshawski #7. Delacorte Press, hardcover, 1992. Dell, paperback, 1993.

   I have in general liked the Warshawski novels well enough, though not nearly so well as many have. Something has changed, however, at least for me, between this book and the last [and] I’ll be very interested in your viewpoint.

   In brief: an old friend of her landlord, Mr. Contreras, mooches off him a few nights and while there, hints that he has something on their old employer that is going to make him wealthy. Contreras boots him out finally, and a few days later his body is found, after he had apparently fallen into a canal and drowned near the old employer’s plant.

   Contreras is grief- and guilt-stricken (the dead man had been his oldest friend), and beseeches Warshawski to investigate, even though there is nothing at all to indicate foul play. There is another plot involving an eccentric neighborhood lady whose yard is overgrown and whose dogs run loose vs. a yuppie lawyer neighbor (who works for Vic’s ex”husband’s law firm) who is out to do horrible legal things to her.

   Due to her success, talent, and willingness to speak out, Paretsky has become something of an icon for feminists in the field. Though I have never met the lady, from the interviews and anecdotes Ive read I think it fair to say that she shares at least some qualities with her heroine: courage, anger, and outspokenness, at a minimum.

   While I’m well aware of the pitfalls in projecting a fictional character’s beliefs onto the creator, I am convinced that Paretsky admires Warshawski much in the manner that Robert Parker does his own creation, Spenser; and that, much as with Parker/Spenser, criticism of the books, or of Warshawski, is often taken by Paretsky’s admirers to be criticism of Paretsky herself.

   That’s unfortunate, for while I am neither anti-feminist nor anti-Paretsky, I am becoming more and more anti-Warshawski. I can intellectually understand why someone with strong feminist sympathies would like and approve of her; I cannot see how anyone else could objectively view her as other than a prickly, neurotic, and unpleasant human being.

   She acts foolishly and impulsively, often in sheer rage at being thwarted. Her respect for the law and for the rights of anyone other than those she crusades for is non-existent. She whines, moans, and perishes with endless guilt over actions that lead to unwanted con-sequences, and then repeats them in kind, ad infinitum. Intensely human, you say. Perhaps; but not a human I wish to know any better. I find Warshawski’s friends as unappealing as I find her. I think it safe to say that Paretsky and I see people differently.

   I’m also tired of books with protagonists that act in ways that are absolutely asinine and unrealistic, and this was another such, though to be fair no more so than many others. I won’t take the time or space to detail the inanities, but they’re there, and you’ll find them if you read it.

   Paretsky’s writing is as competent as ever, but it is an unobtrusive competency, a style that will not carry a book regardless of content. In the end, one likes or dislikes Paretsky’s books only as one likes or dislikes Warshawski’s personality, world view, and actions. In Guardian Angel, I liked none of them.

FROM HELL IT CAME. Milner Brothers/Allied Artists, 1957. Tod Andrews, Tina Carver, Linda Watkins, John McNamara, Greg Palmer. Written by Richard Bernstein and Jack Milner. Directed by Dan Milner.

   Actually, the best reviews of this film have already been written, including the six-word classic, “And to Hell it can go.” But From Hell is not without a certain charm once it gets around to the Monster.

   Before that though, there’s a lot of talk in this movie. And I mean whole great big long stretches of it, as the principals in the drama explain the plot to us — talk is always cheaper than action, after all. So the film opens on an island somewhere in the South Pacific (Hey, that’s a good title for a movie!) with native Prince Kimo lying staked to the ground, about to be executed for the murder of his father the King, who was actually killed by the local Witch Doctor and an ambitious usurper (Are there echoes of Hamlet here?) and everyone tells how he got into this awkward quandary.

   Before he dies, Kimo argues his innocence, and come to think of it, there are echoes of Hamlet, because there’s an awful lot of debate about the ethics of the thing before they get around to killing him and he swears to return from the grave, whereupon the scene shifts (uncomfortably) to the American Research Station elsewhere on the island, where we get another talk-fest as two Government Scientists exchange dialogue about who they are and what they’re doing here.

   Turns out there was a recent nuclear test a few hundred miles away, followed by a freak monsoon that blew radioactive dust this way, and our heroes are here to monitor radiation levels. There’s also been an outbreak of disease on the island, but that couldn’t possibly be related, they assure each other.

   The movie doles out these first twenty minutes like a miser at a fun-fair, ringing in comic relief, romantic interest, internecine politics, and generally dispelling insomnia till Kimo finally emerges from his grave and things start to get interesting, because he has come back as a killer tree, known as Tabanga.

   Critic Michael H. Price has pointed out that trees have been used for scary effect quite well in The Wizard of Oz and sundry old cartoons, and maybe that was the inspiration here, but when it came to actually realizing the Terrible Tree Tabanga, it looks like they splurged about Fifty Bucks on the whole thing.

   The Tabanga is a creation of legendary low-budget monster-maker Paul Blaisdell, whose work includes Attack of the Crab Monsters, The She Creature and the memorable turnip-monster in It Conquered the World. Blaisdell’s work was rarely convincing, sometimes laughable, but always imaginative — the She Creature is even rather effective. But as the scowling stump (no relation) toddles about striking terror into the hearts of all, he looks less like something from Hell than like a fugitive from Captain Kangaroo.

   For one thing, Trees are not known for mobility, but Blaisdell’s Tabanga get-up seems restrictive even for a tree. Lacking long limbs for grabbing, he tends to just lumber about (get it?) until he gets close enough to crush anyone conveniently looking the other way or paralyzed with fright for plot purposes.

   One has to commend the cast and director for getting through all this with a straight face and as much speed as a moving tree will permit, but as THE END finally came across the screen, I had to conclude that From Hell It Came was unforgettable for all the wrong reasons.

GARY ALAN RUSE – Death Hunt on a Dying Planet. Signet paperback original; 1st printing, October 1988.

   I picked this one up to read on the basis of not the author’s name, a fairly unknown one, even in science fiction circles, but the title and the cover, both of which promised something that I was looking for at the time.

   Namely, a good old fashioned space opera. It was exactly what I got. Marinda Donelson, a scientist on a colony ship to an alien planet is awakened 700 years after the rest of the passengers and crew have landed, and she finds herself the intense object of interest between two opposing parties. First, the University, based on a moon orbiting another planet, and CorSec, the present rulers of Coreworld, nearly decimated by plague and war and famine.

   You know. The usual. Marinda is rescued by a psybot named Roddi and a cyborg by the name of Vandal, but the three of them are soon forced to crash-land on Coreworld and make their way through all kinds of danger, evading mutants, monstrous war machines and the minions of CorSec, most prominently personified by Razer, a sworn enemy of Vandal.

   Also on the ground are a group of other psybots with all kind of powers who are working incognito for the University. Their task: join forces with Marinda and the others, making their way through all kind of danger, evading mutants and all of the above. Giving them a huge assist, however, is a itinerant master of legerdemain (human) named Dr. Arcanus.

   I needn’t tell you more (but there is more, just under 400 pages of more, with a very neat tidying up at the end and just a hint of more adventures to come, which however never happened). To me, this read like a attempt to channel Edgar Rice Burroughs with the added bonus of more than a dash of video game stratagems and firepower. Lots of firepower.

   As for the writing itself, if I’d have read this when I was sixteen, I’d have thought it was the best book I’d ever read. I didn’t think so now, but as I said up above, it was exactly what I was looking for when I was looking, and I enjoyed it.