Japanese animation, better known as anime, is a favorite of mine for many reasons, one of which is the music. An OP is the opening theme for the series. Check out four of my favorites opening themes (each under 2 minutes long).

MACROSS PLUS. (1994-95) English version. Performed by Michelle Flynn; composed by Yoko Kanno.

   No list of anime op should be without Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop). This is from popular anime series that was a sequel to TV series Macross. The four part OVA (original video animation) and movie tell the story of three childhood friends that had grow apart. The two men rivalry grows when the female friend returns.

BACCANO! (2007) “Guns and Roses.” Performed by Paradise Lunch; omposer: Makoto Yoshimon.

   Anime TV series adapted from series of novels by Ryohgo Narita. Set for the most part in prohibition-era America with multiple storylines told in a chaotic fashion.

TRIGUN (1998) “H.T.” Composed by Tsuneo Imahori.

   This comedy-Western is the story of Vash the Stampede “The Humanoid Typhoon” and his adventures on the planet Gunsmoke with a 60-billion double-dollar bounty on his head.

R.O.D. – THE T.V. (Read Or Die). (2003) Composed by Talu Iwasaki.

   Like many anime series the series exists in many forms – novels, manga, OVA, TV series, and films. The various versions often have the same characters but in different situations. In this version three paper-manipulating sisters are bodyguards to a famous writer.

A. S. FLEISCHMAN – Shanghai Flame. Gold Medal #181, paperback original, 1951.

   Time out for a history lesson. At the time of this story, Shanghai was settling down under the rule of the Communists, and in this tale, the pursuit of a not-so-ordinary pack of playing cards takes place across a city increasingly dangerous to be a foreigner in, much less an American. Whites had not yet become a novelty, however, and displaced European refugees and all sorts of unsavory soldiers of fortune were still playing significant roles in the commerce and life of one of the Orient’s most exotic cities.

   What Cloud does is to smuggle himself into Shanghai, hoping to regain the love of a woman he’d once walked out on, but in these surroundings all that will take is a single spark for the volatile romance to burn itself away in a spectacular flash of unrequited love.

   To the intrigue in which the couple find themselves securely entangled, add a deadline for being able to safely leave the city, Chinese pirates scouring the coastline, and the several sides of a labyrinthic double-cross, and you have the kind of book that’s increasingly difficult to find these days when the whole world’s but a step away — the pure adventure thriller written for the fun of it.

Rating:   B.

SHE. RKO Radio Pictures, 1935. Helen Gahagan, Randolph Scott, Helen Mack, Nigel Bruce. Based on the novel by H. Rider Haggard. Directors: Lansing C. Holden & Irving Pichel. Shown at Cinevent 16, Columbus OH, May 1984.

   Star billing — the film festival’s much heralded centerpiece — was given to a 1935 version of H. Rider Haggard’s erotic fantasy She. It was directed by Irving Pichel (who was also busy acting that year in Dracula’s Daughter that year as Gloria Holden’s pasty-faced valet) and the enigmatic Lansing Holden, with familiar names from King Kong (composer Max Steiner and producer Merian C. Cooper) providing much of the visual and aural interest in this uneven film.

   The stalwart hero, Leo Vincey, is played in a forthright fashion by Randolph Scott, while Nigel Bruce is made to look silly in the throw-away role of the blustering English side-kick. Helen Mack has the thankless job of trying to distract the male viewers from the attractions of the good-bad Ayesha, queen/goddess of the lost city of Kor, which has been transported from Haggard’s African setting to an Asiatic ice-world which provides an excuse for the most striking set-up of the film: the discovery of a centuries-old European and a gigantic sabre-tooth tiger frozen into the ice outside the mountain entrance to the hidden city.

   Helen Gahagan, congresswoman and wife of actor Melvyn Douglas, played She with an effective mixture of icy imperturbability and melting languor. But her best moment had her still shrouded in the steamy mist to which she frequently retreated for mysterious purposes, intoning her lines in a voice that was strikingly similar to the voice of the evil, beautiful queen in the Disney Snow White.

   And this affinity was compounded by a shifting facial image like that of the mirror image in the Queen’s chambers a costume that was too similar to the costume for Disney’s queen not to have been adapted by him. This film would, I am sure, be a popular addition to Saturday afternoon and late night TV schedules, and it’s surprising that it doesn’t turn up more frequently.

CHARLES BEAUMONT “The New People.” First published in Rogue, August 1958. First collected in Night Ride and Other Journeys (Bantam, paperback, Mar 1960). Reprinted many times since, including in Perchance to Dream (Penguin, trade paperback, October 2015).

   It’s not every day that you discover that your neighbors are Satanists. But then again, the usual and the quotidian is hardly the terrain of writer Charles Beaumont. In “The New People,” one of the author’s stories assembled in Night Ride and Other Journeys (1960), the protagonist soon discovers that his typical suburban neighbors are anything but. It’s an altogether well constructed tale, one that ratchets up the suspense, all the while giving the reader the vague sense that he could just as easily find himself in the main character’s proverbial shoes.

   Beaumont, like Ira Levin and Stephen King following him, had a knack for taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary. Just lurking behind the niceties of Any Town USA and blissful marriages are secrets that are first gently, then abruptly, exposed. We never learn the name of the town where “The New People” takes place, but it’s hinted that it may be a place where Hollywood screenwriters reside.

   Soon after moving into their new home, husband and wife Hank and Ann, along with their adopted son Davey, begin to form social relationships with their neighbors. While Davey doesn’t want to have anything to do with the locals, Hank and Ann host a small gathering in their home for the new friends.

   As the night unfolds, one of the neighbors hints to Hank that he has secret, pertinent information that he must share. In a twist of fate reminiscent of the best conte cruels, Hank comes to learn that his newfound friend is anything but. Overall, a well-written story which bolsters my appreciation for Beaumont’s writing.

BLOWING WILD. Warner Brothers, 1953. Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Anthony Quinn, Ruth Roman, Ward Bond, Ian MacDonald. Screenplay by Philip Yordan. Directed by Hugo Fregonese.

   The spicy pulp and paperback original spirit lives in this adventure film/soap opera with a few noirish touches.

   The setting is somewhere in Central America in what was then contemporary times. Jeffrey Dawson (Gary Cooper) and Dutch (Ward Bond) are wildcat oilmen whose lease is destroyed by bandits leaving them to hitchhike back to civilization looking for work. Along the way they meet a tough smart but vulnerable girl (Ruth Roman) of a type not unusual in adventure fiction — good girl, but not a fanatic about it — and get cheated out of money owed them for delivering nitro to a well through bandit country by a four-flusher (Ian MacDonald).

   Dutch is wounded and Jeff needs money, meaning he has to turn to old pal Paco Conway (Anthony Quinn) who the two encountered earlier, but turning to Paco, now a successful oilman, is the last thing Jeff wants to do because Paco is married to Marina (Barbara Stanwyck) who Jeff once loved, and Marina is bad news, twisted, destructive, promiscuous, and sick to death of her husband. Both she and Roman’s character might have crawled out of any Gold Medal paperback of the era full blown.

   To say Marina has a thing for Jeff is putting it mildly, Marina is a female jaguar in heat, and just about as dangerous to all involved. There is enough wattage in the scene where she comes to Jeff’s bedroom and he turns a lamp on her in the doorway like a spotlight to power a small town for a week, although it is all underplayed, and fully clothed.

   Stanwyck was unsurpassed at portraying female lust with just a smoldering look and a raspy tone of voice. Just watching her, and remembering the heat she and Cooper engendered back in Ball of Fire and Meet John Doe, you fear for Cooper’s characters virtue — however tarnished and shopworn it may be.

   Paco, meanwhile, has troubles, a wife who doesn’t love him and who, along with his success, has caused him to lose his nerve; and, those self same bandits who blew up Jeff and Dutch’s well and now threaten all that Paco owns.

   No surprises in this film. It is shot handsomely on location and you get a lot of shots of Stanwyck whipping her galloping horse in various states of sexual frustration to the Frankie Laine theme song from Dimitri Tiomkin, plenty of the patented Stanwyck look of passionate fires just barely tamped down enough not to escape, and, of course, also Stanwyck flaring whenever crossed by her husband or Jeff. At times you half to expect her to throw herself off the screen and sexually assault the nearest man.

   You know going in there will have to be a shootout with the bandits and that Stanwyck won’t long put up with Paco in the way of her passion for Jeff, that Paco will finally interpret those hot long looks Marina gives Jeff and react violently, and just as certainly the pump jack in the courtyard of their hacienda, that was the first well Paco hit it big with and the noise from which drives Marina mad, is going to play a role in how both their marriage and their lives end.

   Having spent part of my youth with an oilman father and grandfather, I can testify to how annoying a pump jack in the yard can be, even if it is pumping your family’s money from the ground. Blowing Wild is a bit closer to oil field reality than most. At least it got a few details right, and God knows I knew enough men like Jeff, Dutch, and Paco in my youth, and no few women like Stanwyck’s Marina or Roman’s character around them if they didn’t quite look like their Hollywood counterparts or have Philip Yordan writing their sharp innuendo laden dialogue.

   Even Ian MacDonald’s four flushing cheat is true enough to life. The oil business may be one of the few industries in the world as colorful as its publicity. at least it was then.

    Blowing Wild is professionally done, tightly directed, and with an impeccable cast. It is pulp dressed up with a touch of Freud and Kraft-Ebling and a slight noir glaze, but it is well done for all that, diverting, and just about any film with that cast, screenwriter, and director would hold me for at least the running time.

   Granted it is almost done in semaphore, the obvious nature of every scene telegraphed well before it appears. It’s a not-quite Western in an adult mode, more than worth watching, just for Cooper, Stanwyck, and Quinn in my case, and if you can get that Frankie Laine theme song out of your head for a day or two after watching it you are a better man than I.     (*)

   (*) And yes, I could hear Bosley Crowther, the famous film critic who liked to sum up films in plays on their titles, commenting, Blowing Mild, but honestly it is a perfectly good middling Gold Medal original of a film you will almost certainly enjoy in the right mood.

JAMES HADLEY CHASE – We’ll Share a Double Funeral. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover, 1982. Corgi, UK, paperback, 1983 & 1988 (the latter shown). No US edition.

   It’s a great title, and more than that, it’s appropriate too. It comes up in the course of the book more than once. The cover is very nice, too, not that it has anything much to do with the story, but when did that stop a paperback publisher from doing whatever they could to catch a would-be buyer’s eye?

   As for the book itself, Chase was no wordsmith, there’s no doubt about that, but as always he’s as direct and single-minded in telling a story as he needs to be to keep the pages turning, and there’s nothing more complimentary I can say about an author than that.

   The main protagonist in Double Funeral is Chet Logan, as ferocious a killer when he’s cornered as a rabid animal, and by the time he’s finally tracked down and killed in the final chapter, he’s taken nearly a dozen others with him. Taken as a hostage in a Florida fishing lodge is Perry Weston, a big-time screenplay writer for the movies who’s come down from New York City to get away from his much younger wife who’s been cheating on him, and who decides to come down herself to make up.

   One paragraph is all it takes to sum it up, but when you finished reading all 176 pages of the paperback edition, you’ll know you’ve read the most hard-boiled book you’ve sped your way through all day. I guarantee it.

EDMUND CRISPIN – Buried for Pleasure. Lippincott, US, hardcover, 1949. First published by Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1948. US paperback reprints include: Bestseller Mystery #187, digest-sized, 1949; Pyramid X1937, 1969; Perennial Library, 1980; Felony & Mayhem, trade paperback, 2009.

   Faute de mieux, Professor Gervase Fen decides to run for Parliament as an Independent. It’s an odd constituency, but Fen, of course, is even odder: “He was haunted … by a growing fear that he might actually be elected…. A whole-time preoccupation with democratic politics, he rapidly discovered, is not easily imposed on a humane and civilised mind. In no very long time the gorge rises and the stomach turns.”

   Luckily for Fen, as something to take his mind off his own problem, a woman in the area who was being blackmailed has been murdered and then another murder occurs. As Fen campaigns and investigates, he must deal with Elphinstone the lunatic who thinks he is Woodrow Wilson, the non-doing pig, a most peculiar poltergeist, a not very competent psychiatrist named Boysenberry, assorted eccentrics, and, of course, his would-be constituents.

   Marvelously amusing. Fen’s final speech of the campaign with all its home truths should not be missed. Oh, it’s a fair-play mystery, too, but you should be too busy laughing to figure it out.

GEOFFREY NORMAN – Blue Chipper. Morgan Hunt #2. Morrow, hardcover, 1992. Avon, paperback, 1994.

   Let’s get one thing out of the way. The publicity material describes Norman as “…a worthy successor to John D. MacDonald.” Not. Norman is a competent writer, but light-years away from MacDonald in both depth and style. Nor, as intimated, is Morgan Hunt a reincarnation of Travis McGee. None of which is to say, mind you, that this isn’t a good book, and Hunt not an engaging character.

   Hunt is an ex-con, now pardoned, who made a pot of money playing the commodities market while in jail. A licensed private investigator, he works occasionally for a Pensacola lawyer, more for something to do than anything else. In Chipper, a black friend who is a sheriff’s deputy asks his help. A young black who has no redeeming qualities has been arrested for a drug-related murder; no problem there. The problem is that his brother is the best basketball player ever to come out of Florida, and that within an hour of the arrest a white man shows up at their mother’s house offering to get the murder charge reduced — if the basketball star will sign with the state university.

   Hunt calls his lawyer friend (who has represented the miscreant before, and they begin a chase which leads them deep into the world of major college athletics.

   I enjoyed the book, as I did the first Hunt opus, Sweetwater Ranch. Norman writes in a spare, lean style with a lot of well-done dialogue, and has a feel for the look and smells of the Florida Panhandle. His characters are well realized and appealing, particularly Hunt’s lady, the Cajun Jessie Beaudreaux. Hunt himself is laconically competent, and overly given to introspection.

   My only cavil was with the plot. I am quite cognizant of and devoutly opposed to the hypocrisy and avarice with which major college athletics are saturated, but I think Norman may have made it all a little too evil — assuming that’s possible.

Bibliographic Note: There were only two more books in the Morgan Hunt series: Deep End (1994) and Blue Light (1995).

DON VON ELSNER – Just Not Making Mayhem Like They Used To. Signet S2040, paperback original, 1961.

   It’s not often I review a book I haven’t actually finished but here goes. And I warn you at the outset that there may be SPOILERS lurking in the shadows here.

   I bought this because the title seemed clever, and as I got into it, it looked fast, fun and forgettable… well it turned out to be two out of three. In fact, it starts off pretty well, with a particularly nasty blackmail racket, run by a team of ruthless professionals. We get a terse opening as they ply their trade, and then…

   Then the scene shifts to our hero, Colonel David Danning, retired from the military and working, when he chooses, as a high-powered attorney-cum-investigator with a specialty in arrogance directed at those whose problems don’t interest him. Author Von Elsner surrounds Danning with the usual entourage: loyal and shapely secretary; brilliant and beautiful love-interest; bungling admirer…. Sort of like the Doc Savage Gang slanted a bit toward James Bond for the swinging ‘60s.

   Danning grudgingly agrees to look into a surprising spike in suicide claims for an insurance conglomerate, then becomes intrigued as he finds the common link among them, which of course is the nasty blackmailers.

   From this point on, Von Elsner runs the usual gamut of clichés: The unwilling witness withholds valuable information; someone figures it all out but gets knocked on the head and put in a coma; Danning is framed for theft and murder and fired by his client; and (my personal favorite) someone involved arranges to tell him everything “later” and ends up dead. And may I say I have often thought that if I ever want to end my life I will use the simple expedient of calling the Police to say I know the identity of the Real Murderer and arrange for them to come over for the information, secure in the knowledge that I will be dead when they get here, in the grand tradition of mystery books through the ages.

   Mayhem moves too fast for all this to get tiresome however, and I zipped easily through it until I got to the penultimate chapter, when Danning explains everything to the Bewildered Cops and sundry bystanders. But when he got to the part about Transvestite Acrobats I could take no more. I mean, really: Transvestite acrobats? Really?

   Von Elsner may have written something meaningful and significant in the last few pages, but I shall never know; I threw the book into my “Sell This Book” pile, sadly aware that I had squandered those hours of my precious youth. I recommend you save yourself the effort.