ROBERT A. HEINLEIN “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.” First published in Unknown Worlds, October 1942, as by John Riverside. Reprinted many times, most notably in the Gnome Press collection having the same title (1959).

   The impact of the hard-boiled school of writing can be seen today in many literary voices, but not surprisingly, it first made itself felt in genre fiction, and not just in the mystery genre. In the 1930’s the voice began to appear in the Western, in Hollywood films, and in science fiction, particularly in that branch of science fiction known as Campbellian after editor and writer John W. Campbell Jr. It was only natural then that as the lines blurred the genres would blend together somewhat, and by the 1940’s, it was well established in most genre fiction.

   Unknown (later Unknown Worlds) the companion to Campbell’s science fiction pulp Astounding Science Fiction, published a great deal of fantasy and horror, but all along the Campbellian ideal of well worked out logical fiction, many of the works appearing there the best of the writers’ careers and among the best and most loved stories of its age.

   Most of the major writers from Astounding contributed to Unknown as well, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Isaac Asimov, A. E. Van Vogt, and some earlier writers like Jack Williamson and Henry Kuttner. Humor, horror, adventure, and high fantasy went hand in hand. De Camp and Pratt’s “Incomplete Enchanter,” Hubbard’s “Fear,” “Death’s Deputy,” and “Typewriter in the Sky,” Williamson’s “Darker than You Think,” Eric Frank Russell’s “Sinister Barrier,” and many other classics first saw light there. Among those who wrote for the new market was Robert A. Heinlein, dean of the Campbellian science fiction movement, who wrote this little novelette under the name John Riverside.

   In it Teddy Randall and his wife Cynthia (Cyn) are private investigators approached by Mr. Jonathan Hoag, a prim and somehow unsettling individual they both take an instant dislike to, but his money is good and the case seems simple enough if a bit whacky. Mr. Hoag, it seems, has a memory problem.

   No, not amnesia, at least not exactly. Mr. Hoag doesn’t know what he does during his days. They are a complete blank, so when he finds what he fears is blood under his fastidious finger nails he hires the Randalls to follow him. Whacky, as I said, but the the Randalls aren’t the scrupulous type, and money is money. They take the case. So what if their client doesn’t appear to have any fingerprints.

   The Randalls work together, a well oiled and capable little investigative team, and part of the enjoyment is watching the duo think and work. They are a sort of sexy slightly larcenous Nick and Nora or Pam and Jerry North, an attractive addition to the subgenre of married sophisticated sleuths that delighted mystery fans in the years following the debut of Hammett’s Nick and Nora.

   And follow Mr. Hoag they do, until Randall discovers the address and the office in the Acme Building he followed Hoag to on the first day doesn’t exist and even the floor of the building he was on isn’t there. At first they suspect he was drugged by Hoag, or that worse, he was hypnotized when Hoag stopped and spoke to him, but Hoag genuinely doesn’t appear to remember the encounter or anything else Randall saw that day.

   Things get even more weird when Randall meets a threatening Mr. Stoles:

   Stoles than recounts a simply horrifying and ridiculous story, something about the Sons of the Bird, and Randall wakes up in his bed from the nightmare. He tries to shake it off, but things are getting weirder by the minute what with Hoag now telling them that he is being watched — from inside the mirror. Hoag even seems to attack Cyn the next time she follows him, and she can’t even defend herself despite having a gun. Then there’s the note neither of them wrote:

   When they go to Hoag’s doctor things get even stranger.

   And things are about to get stranger yet, when the Randalls discover a new full length mirror has been installed in their bedroom.

   Perhaps the best thing about “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” is that it doesn’t let the reader down. Heinlein pays off in a finale that is both disturbing and a bit funny, but also profoundly disturbing. Don’t blame me if after you read it you remove the mirror from your bedroom and handcuff yourself to your loved one every night at bedtime like the Randalls.

   Blame Heinlein, and Jonathan Hoag. While it isn’t horror, and you could even call it a satirical masterpiece, the story will leave you with more than a frisson in its profoundly disturbing implications. Like Fritz Leiber’s “Conjure Wife” and Jack Williamson’s “Darker Than You Think” from the same magazine the frights here lie in the implication more than the instrumentation.

   It rivals Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in that, as was written of that book, it is the rare mystery where the solution to the crime is more terrifying than the crime itself.

CHARLES SHEA LeMONE – A Dance in the Street. Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1993.

   This rough, untamed and rather disjointed PI novel is the only entry for the author in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, but a little searching online reveals that Charles Shea LeMone was no one-shot mystery writer who had one bow in the sun and moved on.

   According to his homepage, his 2009 novel Corner Pride was “a semi-autobiographic story about ‘growing up on the most dangerous block in North Philadelphia. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and is being read in high school and college classes.”

   Not bad for a PI paperback writer, no matter who it may be. The private eye in question is Solomon Priester, whose primary occupation is that of taxi driver, and whose adventure in A Dance in the Street takes him to all the high and low spots in Los Angeles, naming off streets and locales very familiar to anyone who’s visited or lived in that huge, almost living city of neon lights, dark streets and twisting hilltop roads.

   Given Priester’s unclipped Rastafarian locks, first mentioned on page two, it is easy to surmise that he is black, as is the author, the latter confirmed only by his photo on his web page. When Priester picks up a young girl on a rainy night on Sunset Boulevard, obviously in trouble, and she asks him to take her to the Valley, he does not know but seems to sense that she will be dead the next day, and he will have been the last person to have seen her alive.

   At best, to me this was no more than a mediocre detective story. The writing is more than acceptable, perhaps even fine at times, but I found the rhythm was off, the dialogue only words people were saying, with no life to them. Add in the New Age-y girl friend Priester finds along the way, his personal back story, the over-the-top trouble he gets into with the cops, and nothing really works.

   There are gaps in the continuity and two major characters, unrelated, have the same last name, suggesting that a better editor could have been useful. (One of the two seems to disappear completely two-thirds of the way through.) I also am not very interested when the top villain in a PI novel is called the Dwarf.

   You may find yourself more in sync with this one than I did, but as you can probably tell — and I am sorry to say — I wasn’t.

COLIN WATSON – Charity Ends at Home. Putnam, US, hardcover, 1968. Berkley, US, paperback, 1969; Dell/Murder Ink, paperback, US, 1983. First published in the UK by Eyre & Spottiswoode, hardcover, 1968.

   Flaxborough seems to be a quiet sort of town, if such a description can, after all, apply to a place that attracts much more than its share of murders, with only mild cases of eccentricity afflicting the majority of its inhabitants. Nothing gets done right away of its own accord, for, you see, “Perhaps It’ll Go Away” is not a bad motto to live by — thinking in this case primarily of Chief Constable Chubb, who is the first to get one of the unsigned letters sent to various townspeople warning them somehow of the writer’s impending doom.

   Inspector Purbright seems a little more alert than some of the other folks around, but it does seem a little more than miraculous that he can make anything at all of this affair, befuddled as it quickly becomes by an incipient war building up between various charity organizations on the streets of Flaxborough and by a persistent and mendacious private detective all the way from London.

   It’s a nice little scheme that’s been put into action — bewildering in spots, while very easily seen through in others. I was fooled nicely, I have to admit, by the above-mentioned letters, but not in the least, I hasten to add, by who done it.

Bibliographic Notes:   This is the fifth of 12 Inspector Purbright novels, of which one was never published in the US, and of those which were, many had title changes. Four of them were adapted into made-for-TV movies as part of the 1977 BBC series Murder Most English: A Flaxborough Chronicle. I reviewed the series here on this blog almost seven years ago.

  JACK FINNEY – The House of Numbers. Dell First Edition A139, paperback original, May 1957. Expanded from a novella in Cosmopolitan, July 1956. Film: MGM, 1957, with Jack Palance, Harold J. Stone, Edward Platt, Barbara Lang.

   Jack Finney has the unusual ability to create edge-of-the-chair tension and sustain it throughout a long narrative. In this riveting tale, Ben Jarvis and Ruth Gehlmann conspire to help Ben’s brother, Arnie, escape from San Quentin. Arnie, who was sentenced for passing bad checks while trying to raise money to buy Ruth an expensive engagement ring, has attacked a guard; there is a paroled prisoner on the way back to San Quentin to testify about the assault, and the penalty for attacking a guard is death.

   Arnie appeals to Ben for help and lays out a dangerous but basically simple scheme for escape. Ben wavers but finally he and Ruth agree to aid Arnie. The scheme unfolds bit by bit, and the reader is solidly on Ben and Ruth’s side throughout, experiencing their apprehension and terror — and eventually agonizing over the same terrible decision they face.

   Finney knows San Quentin, although his view of it is colored by his association with then-warden Harley O. Teets, a humanitarian administrator to whom the book is dedicated. (In fact, the dialogue of the fictional warden reads a little like a public-relations release.) However the method Finney devises for the escape is ingenious, and characters are well drawn. The suspense, as with all of Finney’s works, is guaranteed to keep you turning the pages.

   Although best known for his science fiction and fantasy works, such as the popular Body Snatchers (1955), which was twice made into a film under the title Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978), Finney has also written three other suspense novels: Five Against the House (1954), Assault on a Queen (1959), and The Night People (1977). Five Against the House was made into an excellent film in 1955, starring Kim Novak and Brian Keith, and directed by Phil Karlson.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

KING OF THE JUNGLE. Paramount, 1933. Buster Crabbe, Frances Dee, Sidney Toler, Nydia Westman, Robert Barrat, Irving Pichel, Douglas(s) Dumbrille. Based on the novel The Lion’s Way, by Charles Thurley Stoneham. Directors: H. Bruce Humberstone & Max Marcin. Shown at Cinevent 31, Columbus OH, May 1999.

   I saw this on TV several years ago and was not impressed by it, but this time I found it a pleasant diversion, with Buster Crabbe as Kaspa, raised in the jungle after the deaths of his parents, and brought to the states with his lions to perform in a circus.

   Frances Dee, a teacher who’s hired to teach Kaspa English, teaches him a couple of others things as well before the predictable fade-out in the studio backlot studio set.

   This doesn’t give the first couple of the first MGM Tarzan films any real competition (Frances Dee, while attractive, is not Maureen O’Sullivan), but a spectacular circus fire provides some genuine excitement and the animals are magnificent specimens and out-act some of the supporting players.

H. P. LOVECRAFT “The Terrible Old Man.” Written January 28, 1920, and first published in the Tryout, an amateur press publication, July 1921. Appeared in Weird Tales, August 1926. Reprinted many times.

   Although there really isn’t that much literary value in the story, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” could certainly be built upon and skillfully adapted into a truly captivating Gothic horror film. Originally published in the amateur journal Tryout (1921) and subsequently reprinted many times, including Pirate Ghosts of the American Coast (1988), the very brief story is notable for its New England coastline setting, one that Lovecraft would return to time and again in his more sophisticated writings.

   The plot is simple, but loaded with noticeable xenophobic undertones that make this little known story even less valuable than it otherwise would have been in light of Lovecraft’s far more historically significant later works. While the titular character, the Terrible Old Man, is never given an identifying name, the men who plot to steal from the old mysterious pirate are most explicitly marked by their “ethnic” sounding names: Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva.

   Not only am I guessing Italian, Polish, and Portuguese, but that these three aforementioned nationalities were among Lovecraft’s least favorite immigrant groups in his home town of Providence, Rhode Island. For it is this gang of three men – three “foreigners” in Protestant New England – who seek to rob the story’s old man – a former sea captain – of his treasure.

   Yet, it is the sea captain who has the last laugh. For he is terrible indeed! Although the supernatural elements in the story are relatively attenuated, at least for an H.P. Lovecraft story, the reader learns that the three would be robbers are found murdered. The old man, clearly the responsible party, is said to have yellow eyes. Is he a ghost or a zombie? We never learn, which allows our imaginations to run wild.

   As I said at the outset, this is hardly a commendable work of literary fiction; in many ways, it is amateurish in the extreme. But there’s something there, some genuine imaginary terror lurking behind the terrible old man’s eyes. It’s a chilling little tale, one that I thought I’d soon forget after reading it, but oddly enough one that has stuck in my mind for a while.

LAND RAIDERS. Columbia Pictures, 1970. Telly Savalas, George Maharis, Arlene Dahl, Janet Landgard, Guy Rolfe, Phil Brown, George Coulouris, Jocelyn Lane, Fernando Rey. Director: Nathan Juran.

   As far I call tell, the title of this European-filmed Western has nothing to do with the story, but it’s an entertaining tale that I enjoyed more than I do most of the so-called “spaghetti westerns” of the same era. Not that it’s without its flaws, but both the direction and the camera work show more intelligent thought went into the making of this movie than most low-budget westerns of the late 60s and early 70s.

   One visual point you may have to concede on, and admittedly it is a tough pill to swallow, is that Telly Savalas and George Maharis are brothers in this film, the latter embracing his Mexican heritage and the former doing his best to rise far above it. He is, even more than that, not only the richest land-owner in the area, southern Arizona, but he is also the greediest, with only the threat of the US Government taking his open land from him to use for an Apache reservation threatening his wealth and power.

   To that end, his primary obsession is that of fomenting war against the Apaches, whom he considers vermin who must only be exterminated. Threatening this, there is a feud between himself and his brother, which has something to do with the woman the latter intended to marry.

   Flashbacks, rather skillfully done, are therefore an important part of the way the story is told. On screen there is plenty of stampedes, runaway stages, scalping, pillaging, raping and even a bloody massacre to keep the action going in non-stop fashion. (Some of this appears to be stock footage from other films.)

   George Maharis acquits himself well throughout. Bald, without a hat, Telly Savalas is more than adequate as one of the most evil men in the West, but with a cowboy hat on, I’m sorry to say that he just looks silly.

RAWHIDE. 2oth Century Fox, 1951. Tyrone Power, Susan Hayward, Hugh Marlowe, Dean Jagger, Edgar Buchanan, Jack Elam, George Tobias, Jeff Corey, James Millican. Director: Henry Hathaway.

   Tyrone Power isn’t exactly what you’d call a Western icon. He’s no Gary Cooper or a James Stewart, let alone a Joel McCrea or a John Wayne. But that doesn’t stop Henry Hathaway’s Rawhide from being an excellent, if not widely heralded, Western film about a man forced out of his daily life and into a dangerous maelstrom.

   Filmed in crisp black and white, in which many frames seem like exquisitely staged photographs, Rawhide avoids many of the melodramatic pitfalls that made far too many early 1950s westerns bland and altogether forgettable movies about good guys battling bad guys and love triumphing over hate. There’s not much in the way of lighthearted banter or comic relief in this film. The movie is brooding and claustrophobic, not lighthearted and warm. Romance takes a back seat to fear and violence. To that extent, the film can be seen as a precursor to Budd Boetticher’s dusty and gritty Westerns starring Randolph Scott.

   The plot is relatively straightforward. Power portrays Tom Owens, the educated son of an Overland Mail Company executive who’s learning the family business. To that end, he’s living and working at a relay station for the stage called Rawhide Station. Owens isn’t a particularly tough guy; he’s just there to learn the ropes. But when he learns that there are escaped convicts in the area, he becomes determined to make sure that stage passenger Vinnie Holt (Hayward) doesn’t fall into their grasp.

   A noble effort, but a failed one, given that pretty soon the outlaw escapee gang lead by Zimmerman (Hugh Marlowe) invades Rawhide Station and takes Owens and Holt captive. Making matters worse is the fact that one of Zimmerman’s partners in crime, Tevis (Jack Elam) has his predatory eyes on Holt. Elam plays the sociopath Tevis with such skill that it’s occasionally difficult not to like this rakish villain, even though you know better.

   Although set out West in the midst of solid desert and howling coyotes, Rawhide plays out less like a Western than a home invasion film, a story of a man and a woman who are forced to confront evil in the most domestic of settings. It’s a gripping portrayal of a man forced to his limits and one which ever so subtly asks the questions: What would you do in a situation like this? How brave are you?

GORDON YOUNG “Born to Be Hanged, But…” Adventure, 03 December 1919.

   So speaks young Don Everhard, the hero of Gordon Young’s tough novelette that headlined the December 3, 1919, edition of the great pulp Adventure. It was a pretty good issue too, Harold Lamb’s “Said Afzel’s Elephant”, and stories by J. Allan Dunn, and Arthur O. Friel, but it’s the Young novelette and Don Everhard the character that are of interest here.

   The story is pretty straight forward. Young Don Everhard, actually Don Richmond of a respectable San Francisco family, is a professional gambler with a fast and deadly gun in contemporary San Francisco. During an election year he comes upon an incriminating letter that would embarrass reform candidate Congressman Bryan and beautiful Helen Curwen and favor James H. Thorpe, a lumberman and Bryan’s opponent for the governor’s race. Everhard has a history with Thorpe and roundly hates him. (“If he was a Republican I would vote Democrat, and if he was a Democrat I would vote Republican”).

   In knightly style Everhard returns the letter unread to Mrs. Curwen, but when word gets out he had the letter he is approached by two men to buy it; one the mysterious Ellis, and the other an agent of Thorpe. Everhard isn’t having any of it, but when Thorpe tries to set him up in a poker game with a professional gunman, he kills the man and has to go to ground, which he does hiding out as a crew member on a ship, until the truth comes out.

   When he is cleared Mrs. Curwen approaches him. She is meeting with Thorpe to try and beard the lion over the letter, but when the meeting ends in a blaze of gunfire … well, as Everhard opens the story:

   Of course he gets out of it and retains his honor and the ladies, but the really interesting part of this story is in the telling, because years before Carroll John Daly or Dashiell Hammett, the only thing distinguishing Don Everhard from the hard boiled private eye of a thousand pulp stories is that he’s a gambler and not a detective. The language is the same, all-American unsentimental (but actually very sentimental) voice of Twain and London, out of Bret Harte and the Dime Novel. Young is a better writer than Daly, but if Daly didn’t read these and Race Williams and wasn’t influenced by the diamond-hard fast-shooting gambler I would be greatly surprised.

   A “witch’s mirror of blood.” If that isn’t the hardboiled voice of Black Mask, I never heard it.

   Robert Sampson wrote more about Gordon Young and Don Everhard in Yesterday’s Faces, his massive work on the early pulps. Today Young is best remembered for his South Seas adventure tales about Hurricane Williams, with only one expensive edition of Everhard stories reprinted, but if Young and Don Everhard are not quite the hardboiled private eye that soon followed they are so close that the difference is difficult to measure.

   Like his private eye pulp descendants Everhard is a tough, no nonsense, cynical, fast-thinking, fast-shooting hardboiled egg with a soft center, an errant knight on the edge between respectable society and the underworld, a man with his own code and his own rules navigating a twisting course between the innocent and not so innocent and the truly guilty, brutal, corrupt, and dangerous.

   The voice and the idea may not be quite there yet, but like the last half of Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear, we are so close to the hardboiled private eye we can feel his breath on the back of our neck. I would argue that with this story alone Young was already ahead of Daly’s “Knights of the Open Palm” or Three Gun Terry Mack by a mile.

REX STOUT “Man Alive.” First published in The American Magazine, December 1947. Included in the collection Three Doors to Death (Viking, 1950; Dell #626, 1952; Bantam, 1966).

   It’s been too long, far too long, since I’ve read one of Rex Stout’s tales of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin on a case together, and if I can, I’m going to make a point of going back and re-reading as many of them this summer as I’m able to, with a special point of emphasis on the few that I’ve never gotten around to read. Shame on me.

   It is difficult to say exactly why it is so, but the stories are very much timeless. I had no difficulty at all in slipping back in a time bubble to the insular world of a Manhattan brownstone office and home, picking up when I left off, with another case at Wolfe’s door. It is difficult to believe that this story was written in 1947. The few references to the outside world are Archie’s new Cadillac and the fashion show that Archie attends in hopes of spotting the father of their new client, female and the about to become the new owner of the firm.

   Why, you may ask. It so happens that the girl’s father is dead, having committed suicide by jumping naked into a geyser at Yellowstone Park. This being a Nero Wolfe mystery, of course he is not dead, and although he was in disguise, the girl knows she saw him at a previous show.

   Also, because this is a Nero Wolfe mystery, it is no surprise to the reader when her father turns up dead for real, and Wolfe’s client is suspected of the murder. This is also one of those affairs in which Wolfe gathers all of the possible suspects in his office, police in presence, to determine the real killer.

   He is flummoxed, though, when all of the suspects alibi each other. None of them could have done it, save perhaps his client. Although taken aback, Wolfe probes further, digs deeper, and after some pursing of his lips, is able to steer the conversation around to the only solution there could be to the crime.

   It’s a very good detective story, but even better was the company and familiar surroundings.