YOU’LL NEVER SEE ME AGAIN. An episode of Armchair Theatre, ABC/ITV, UK, 16 August 1959 (Season 3, Episode 49). Ben Gazzara, Leo Genn, Brenda de Banzie, James Hayter, Derek Aylward, Jacqueline Ellis. Based on the story by Cornell Woolrich (Detective Story Magazine, November 1939; reprinted as by William Irish, Dell 10 Cent series #26, paperback, 1951). Director: Ted Post.

   A real oddity turned up on Cable in the middle of the night last week: You’ll Never See Me Again was made for Britain’s Armchair Theatre back in 1959, and to my knowledge has never aired before on American Television. At least Mike Nevins hadn’t seen it as of 1988, when he wrote his exhaustive Woolrich bio-bibliography, First You Dream, Then You Die.

   And it’s not bad at all. Somewhat on the level of a really good episode of The Avengers or Secret Agent. Ben Gazzara stars, playing the lead as a rather cold, unlikable sort, in the Laurence Harvey mode. He’s had a spat with his wife, it seems, and she ran home to Mother. Only she never got there. And no one saw her go.

   So when days pass, and she doesn’t show up (she is, in fact, never seen in the hour-long film) Ben finds himself haunted by a lackadaisical but persistent Police Inspector, intelligently played by Leo Genn. Their escalating cat-and-mouse game builds up very nicely to heights of Woolrichian paranoia (he imagined the Police to be literally everywhere) as the bereft husband tries with increasing desperation to find some shred of proof that he didn’t kill his wife, and at the same time come to terms with his feelings about her.

   And all the while, Genn keeps turning up in the oddest places, generally supine on a sofa, asking languidly if he’d care to confess to something.

   It’s all directed very competently by Ted Post, a filmmaker I’ve never cared much for, and despite the truncated late-night presentation, I enjoyed it quite a lot. Look for it.

BLUE VELVET. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group / 20th Century Fox, 1986. Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, Hope Lange, Dean Stockwell. Screenwriter-director: David Lynch.

   I have never listened to much popular music — other than show music — and for all I know Bobby Vinton’s recording of “Blue Velvet” may be a period piece that captures the feeling of a year or even of a decade. Whatever its importance as a popular icon, David Lynch has used it effectively in his film Blue Velvet where the plushy, languorous singing, returning insistently like a haunting~ refrain, provides an erotic, languorous counterpoint to the often brutal events of a film that, like Lynch’s first movie, Eraserhead, shows some promise of becoming a cult classic.

   Kyle MacLachlan, the apple-cheeked hero of Lynch’s film of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction epic novel, Dune, plays a seemingly innocent hero who, like the heroine of many an insufferable Gothic romance, blunders against all good sense into a situation in which his life and even his virtue are at peril.

   Lynch’s intention is, in part, satiric — as it was in the memorable Eraserhead — and, against the background of an idealized all-American city captured in colors that have the intensity of pop art painting, Kyle/Jeffrey, obsessed with the masochistic needs of a sexually tormented singer — played by Isabella Rossellini- attempts to unravel the intricate psycho-sexual empire presided over by a demented Dennis Hopper.

   MacLachlan is aided by a somewhat mature Nancy Drew, splendidly portrayed by blond Laura Bern, the “good” woman in his life (as sultry, raven-haired Rossellini is his “dark” mistress), who, in some perplexity, asks him if he is a “pervert” or a detective. Summoning up as much of a leer as his somewhat limited acting skill will allow, Maclachlan replies that it is for “me to know and you to find out.”

   This gauntlet is, of course, also thrown down to the sometimes bemused viewer, and this Chinese-box film, with its blue velvet song and fabric serving as an opening and closing frame, will not find a disinterested audience.

   If some equivalent of the League for Moral Decency is still functioning, an extended sequence in which Rossellini seduces a fascinated but somewhat reluctant hero into a sado-masochistic tumble should have its adherents taking to the streets in self-righteous outrage.

   MacLachlan keeps protesting that he only wants to help while Rossellini pleads with him to hurt her, and it is this psychological ambivalence that lies at the heart (and it is an amused and perverse intelligence which controls it) of this brilliantly directed film.

   Blue Velvet is impeccably cast and often memorably played. Rossellini and Hopper are an unforgettable apparently mismatched pair, while former MGM child star Dean Stockwell plays the stoned proprietor of a peculiarly staffed whorehouse with deadly, pointillist accuracy. Once again, Lynch has shown a particular genius for undermining the American family. Machlachlan’s father, mother, and aunt are Grant Wood figures in a Charles Burchfield darkling wood. Not to be missed are the quick shots of the family’s prime-time TV viewing and the robin-with-beetle episode that closes the film.

   Whatever your view of small-town America may be, it is not likely to be the same after seeing this absorbing movie. Do not expect to be moved or to care about the characters’ fates. Some viewers will feel the film is an assault on basic virtues and common decency, and it is.

   Others will revel in the photography, delight in the often witty script, and find in themselves unsuspected depths of playful decadence in their response to Blue Velvet. The viewer is invited to become a detective but also to participate vicariously in the complex games Lynch plays.

   And it is up to you, dear reader, should you see this film, to answer that provocative question posed by Laura/“Nancy” to Kyle/Jeffrey. But you may not want to share your answer with your best friend, your lover … or yourself.

   If this column doesn’t appeal to you, don’t blame me. Steve Lewis thought some readers might be interested in my latest book, even though it has nothing to do with our genre. So I’ll start off this month recycling the book’s introduction, which I believe conveys what it’s about, and reveals an aspect of your columnist that may surprise many who think of me as just a mystery wonk.

   If you leave out the accident of my birth, the origin of They Called the Shots dates back to 1952. The Korean war was raging overseas, HUAC and Senator Joe McCarthy were raging on the home front, the blacklist was on full tilt, and I was nine years young, living in Roselle Park, New Jersey.

   One night my parents, taking me along, went out to an appliance store to buy their first television set. It was, if memory serves, an Admiral with a 12 -inch screen. The price was around $225 or $250. For the next several years that set drew me to it like a magnet.

   In the early Fifties the major movie studios considered TV the enemy, offering for nothing the same product that theaters charged admission for. They wouldn’t allow their old films to be shown on the small screen, and in their current pictures they often wouldn’t allow a set amid the furniture of a living-room scene.

   Growing up in the New York City area, I had access to seven channels: the CBS, NBC and ABC flagship stations (Channels 2,4 and 7 respectively), the short-lived DuMont network, plus three local independents. With the majors boycotting the medium and the number of made-for-TV series rather small, TV programmers starved for material on film had to fall back on the smaller fry among movie-making companies, mainly Republic, Monogram and PRC.

   During the Thirties and Forties those companies had put out an endless stream of B pictures, primarily but not exclusively Westerns, and Republic had also offered dozens of cliffhanger serials. This was the product, interspersed with Hopalong Cassidy movies (out of which William Boyd, the only actor to play Hoppy, made megamillions by buying the rights to those flicks and licensing them to stations across the country) and early made-for-TV series like The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid, that kept me glued in front of the set for hours every evening. I became a certified telefreak.

   On that tiny screen I watched movies featuring the exploits of various Western stars of previous decades over and over. Some were trio pictures with groups like The Three Mesquiteers and The Range Busters and The Rough Riders. Most starred a single hero: Gene Autry, Eddie Dean, Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, Kermit Maynard (Ken s less successful but perhaps more talented brother), Tim McCoy, Jack Randall, Tex Ritter, Roy Rogers and of course the young John Wayne.

   I got to the point where I could identify at sight dozens of the actors in B Westerns who usually fell to the heroes bullets or fists — Roy Barcroft, Tristram Coffin, Kenne Duncan, I. Stanford Jolley, Charles King, John Merton, Marshall Reed, Hal Taliaferro, Harry Woods, just to name a few at random. Eventually I caught on that the person usually named in a picture s final credit must be important, but what a director did and how he did it I hadn’t the foggiest.

   As I grew older I lost interest in shoot-em-ups and cliffhangers, considering them beneath the notice of a young intellectual such as I fancied myself to be.

   Years slid by. I completed college and law school, passed the bar, and eventually uprooted myself from the east coast to St. Louis where I was invited to become a law professor. And then, slowly but surely, a strange thing happened. I became interested in those old movies again. I had the pleasure of meeting in their golden years some of the actors whose younger incarnations I had watched for hours on end, magnetized by that 12 -inch screen.

   Most important of all, I began to meet and become friends with some of the men whose names were familiar to me from the final credits of those pictures. The ones who called the shots. The directors. I got to watch their films again, sometimes sitting beside them. I got to listen to their stories. Eventually I began to write about them.

   This book is the culmination of that process. It s taken me thousands of hours of viewing time and hundreds of hours of writing time but in my twilight years I still consider the time well spent. I hope I ve communicated what I’ve gotten from all those films, and from the people who made them, in the following pages.

   But perhaps I can spell out here what I’ve looked for, and often found, in pictures of this sort. Reduced to two words, what the first-rate films contain and what the first-rate directors infuse into their films is visual imagination or, in two more words, visual excitement. This quality is the alpha and omega of the kind of movies discussed here.

   Each chapter is self-contained and can be read separately. But many also throw light on other chapters, and to help readers navigate among them, the first time in any chapter the name of a director is mentioned who is the subject of an earlier or later chapter, that name is highlighted.

   For example, in the chapter on William Witney you can see highlighted names like John English or Alan James or Ray Taylor from Bill s point of view, and later you can turn to the chapters on those men and see Bill from their perspective.

   The directors I knew best tend to get the longest and most quote-filled chapters but, because they contributed so much to this book, I want to single them out for mention: in the order of their births, Spencer Gordon Bennet (1893-1987), Joseph H. Lewis (1907-2000), Thomas Carr (1907-1997), and my closest Hollywood friend, Bill Witney (1915-2002). A few others covered here, like Oliver Drake (1903-1991) and R.G. Springsteen (1904-1989), I knew but not all that well. Others, who died too soon, I never had the pleasure of meeting.

   Every director covered here is dead, and most of them died before the beginning of this century. In a sense this book is an assortment of flowers on their graves. In another sense it brings them back, I hope, to life.

   While we’re on the subject of shoot-em-ups, a reader of my last month’s column asked if any of John Creasey’s contributions to that branch of literature got published in the USofA. The answer is Yes. War on the Lazy-K, as by William K. Reilly — one of three bylines under which Creasey turned out (if I’ve counted right) 29 smokeroos for low-on-the-totem-pole English houses like Wright & Brown and Stanley Paul — first appeared in London in 1941, amid the carnage of World War II, and came out over here five years later under the imprint of Phoenix Press.

   Yes, the same Phoenix Press that at the same time was presenting to an indifferent world the novels of that incomparable wackadoodle Harry Stephen Keeler. I am the proud owner of a copy of the Reilly opus, picked up for 50 cents at a YMCA book fair in St. Louis twenty or more years ago. Another copy wound up in the hands of Bill Pronzini, who devotes a couple of pages to it in his tribute to badly written Westerns, Six-Gun in Cheek (1997).

   When I was in Wales back in pre-euro days I pungled up 50 pence apiece for each of several Creasey cactus epics published only in England, but that’s another story. Let’s stick to the one that made it across the pond.

   This one actually has a plot of sorts, but what I find most amazing is that a writer who had never yet visited the U.S. and knew next to nothing about the old West could hammer out so many books of this type in a few days apiece. The narrative passages of Lazy-K are readable enough, although pockmarked with exclamation points and lacking the urgency of the Inspector West and Dr. Palfrey novels Creasey wrote during the same war years.

   But Gad, the dialogue! Just about every one of the horde of characters in this book speaks in dialect—the same wacky dialect for the whole passel of ‘em! “Why’n hell can’t yuh old-timers stop arguin’ among yourselves?” “C’n yuh use a drink?” “Yuh ain’t got a touch of whiskey with yuh, by any chance?” “Yuh’ve heerd me.” The only characters who are spared this form of discourse are the Mexicans. “Thees ees a surprise, Kennedy. I was told that you wair dead.”

   â€œHe wanted to be kept hidden until after Deegby was gone. But undair cover he negotiated with the other outfits.” There’s also one character who’s a Kiowa — or, as Creasey spells it, Kiawa — but him no speakum much. Can you imagine having to remember to misspell so often while pumping out ten or fifteen thousand words a day? What a delight to encounter the occasional rare moment when Creasey blinks and actually spells you y-o-u!

   At least one other among Creasey’s posse of pistol-smokers was published over here, but not in book form. Hidden Range (1946), published in England as by Tex Riley, takes up virtually the entire February 1950 issue of Real Western Stories, one of the Columbia chain of ultra-low-budget pulps edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes. I tripped over a copy of this one in a secondhand bookstore somewhere in Ohio and snagged it for another 50 cents.

   A quick look at the invaluable FictionMags Index website revealed a curious fact I hadn’t been aware of before. A year after Lowndes used Hidden Range in Real Western Stories, he used the exact same novel, this time retitled Forgotten Range, in the February 1951 issue of Western Action, another Columbia pulp. He must have been desperate for material that month!

   But could the Index be wrong here? According to other Creasey bibliographies in print and online, Forgotten Range is a different book, published in England as by Tex Riley in 1947. It strikes me as more credible that this is the title Lowndes ran early in 1951. In any event, he had earlier run another Creasey shoot-em-up, this time under the William K. Reilly byline, Brand Him for Boothill! (Western Action, July 1949), but what title and pen name this one sported in England remains a mystery.

   A word which brings us back to what this column is supposed to be about.

   Hundreds of Creasey’s crime novels were published in the U.S. from the early 1950s until well after his death in 1973, but only nine appeared here before he became a top name in the genre. Eight of these, chronicling the earliest exploits of Raffles-like John Mannering, a.k.a. The Baron, appeared under Creasey’s Anthony Morton byline between 1937 and 1940, although for some obscure reason the character’s nom de thief on this side of the pond was Blue Mask.

   The ninth, and the only book to bear Creasey’s own name on its spine until he became established over here years later, was Legion of the Lost (1944), one of the early espionage adventures of Dr. Palfrey and his colleagues, offered by a publishing house called Stephen Daye, Inc., which seems to have vanished into the mists a few seconds after it was born.

   At a time when I had little or no idea who Creasey was, I found a nice copy of this rarity in an old used bookstore in Elizabeth, N.J. that was a favorite hangout of mine in my formative years. What did the book set me back? One quarter. A wise investment, yes?

CALIFORNIA. American International Pictures, 1963. Jock Mahoney (Don Michael O’Casey), Faith Domergue (Carlotta Torres), Michael Pate (Don Francisco Hernandez), Susan Seaforth (Marianna De La Rosa, Rodolfo Hoyos, Nestor Paiva. Story & Screenplay: James West. Producer-Director: Hamil Petroff.

   I didn’t realize they were still making low budget black-and-white westerns like this as later as 1963, which is when I first started grad school. The stated ambition of the film, according to a short prologue, is to tell the story of California’s fight for independence.

   All the fighting, though, except for a well-choreographed sword fight between leading man Jock Mahoney very near the end of the proceedings, is the stock footage of Mexican soldiers marching their way up the coast to wreck havoc on all the disloyal landowners who stand in their way.

   Once the movie itself begins, it settles down instead to your basic four-sided romantic triangle. Half-Irish half-Spanish Don Michael O’Casey is in love with heiress and black-eyed beauty Carlotta Torres, who is engaged to be married to sinister Don Francisco Hernandez (who not so incidentally was responsible for the death of O’Casey’s father), who spends his time and kisses with cantina owner Marianna De La Rosa.

   The story is mediocre at best — I kept wishing that Zorro would show up — not that Jock Mahoney (looking very much like Yancy Derringer, for some reason) is not very nearly the next best thing, or he would have been, had the story taken a turn for the better that way.

HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – The Skull of the Waltzing Clown. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1935.

   I picked this one up at the last minute to read on a Plane Ride a while back, and I have to say I couldn’t have picked any better.

   It had been a few years since I’d read any Keeler, and though I remembered him fondly as the author of the Strangest Mysteries Ever Written, I’d somehow forgotten just how uniquely talented a writer he really was — in his own way.

   I’ve never read a line of dialogue in a Keeler book that really rang true, never paused over an evocative description nor savored a poetic passage. Keeler’s characters are memorable enough, but none have ever really sprung to life for me, and there are no striking action scenes, breathless chases, or any of the other fol-de-rol that marks lesser writers like Woolrich, Hammett or Chandler.

   No, what makes a Keeler novel is his sheer audacity. No writer before or since has ever dared give such free rein to his own imagination, thrown down the gauntlet to Conventional Realism with such elan, hazarded Disbelief so cavalierly, or sneered so easily in the face of Wildest Coincidence. Nothing is too outrageous for a Keeler novel, and it is this sensation — that literally anything at all might occur — that makes reading him such a delight.

   The Skull of the Waltzing Clown consists mostly of an extended conversation between two men in a room in Chicago. At the same time, though, it’s much more than that: Tales are told, adventures recounted, characters described, letters produced, facts and fictions proven and disproven, bought and sold, until finally the conversation turns into a sort of Metaphysical Crap Shoot, where the players take turns tossing dice at Reality until the classic, last-paragraph denouement.

   I could describe the plot more concretely, I guess, but there’s no point in summarizing a Keeler novel. They have to be read, experienced, to be appreciated, and this one … well it was the perfect literary equivalent of DisneyWorld.

Jazz singer Janice Borla often refers to herself as a “vocal instrumentalist.” To help understand why, listen to this John Coltrane song included on her 1996 album Lunar Octave.

HELEN REILLY – Not Me, Inspector. Random House, hardcover, 1959. Ace Double G-531, paperback, 1963 (packaged with the author’s The Canvas Dagger). Macfadden-Bartell, paperback, 1971.

   Puzzle plots were beginning to make their way out in the late 50s, as far as mystery fiction was concerned, but the authors who’d been writing them since the 30s and 40s were still holding on. Helen Reilly is an author who fits the bill. By 1959, she’d been writing mysteries since 1930 (The Thirty-First Bullfinch, a standalone novel), with this one the 25th of 28 Inspector McKee mysteries.

   Not Me is not a sudden throwback to a period some 15 or 20 years earlier, but rather a continuation of good but not outstanding detective novels by Reilly. The not-so-good news is that while the intricately worked out puzzle works to perfection — it really does — there is a huge problem with the telling of it, and I’ll talk about that shortly.

   It’s not entirely because Inspector McKee has such a small role to play in it, but in a way, it is, because that leaves the characters themselves, innocents and suspects alike, to carry the load, and for a long portion of the book, they don’t.

   To specifics: Mercedes “Dace” Allert’s somewhat weak and definitely bad-tempered husband Harvey disappears soon after it is discovered that he cashed a forged check written on his stepmother’s account. When she dies a lingering death after an automobile accident in a car that Harvey worked on shortly she left the city for upstate New York, he is only spotted here and there, apparently afraid to come home to face the questions that he will be asked and avoiding the consequences. The only thing keeping Dace going is that he does not know that his stepmother died and will not be pressing charges. Not only that, but he has inherited all of her money.

   Reilly was usually very good at pacing her novels, but even the best of authors would find some difficulty in keeping the reader’s attention focused on Dace’s tortured mind, thinking this about her missing husband, then that. In the meantime, though, as a small bonus, we also get a picture of upper middle class society as it was in Manhattan in the 50s, or least one version of it.

   The reason that Inspector McKee is seldom seen in this novel is that there is no obvious homicide victim whose murder needs to be solved, not until page 121 of a 176 page paperback, and that of a woman in Danbury, Connecticut, who has no possible connection to Harvey Allert, other than that a man who called himself Harold Allen had just checked in there, and it was from his room from the dead woman was pushed.

   It seems well nigh impossible for Reilly to tie everything up as neatly as she does, but she does, and no, McKee never has a lot to do with everything but to explain it all up at the end. It’s an ending worth waiting for, and I don’t think the story could have been told any other way, but if there had been, I’d say that this one could have been a contender.

A live version of the title track of singer-songwriter Eileen Jewel’s 2009 CD. You might not want to listen to this CD when you’re down or depressed. I think all of the songs are as melancholy as this one.