From the album All the Friendly Colours by Hedge Capers and Donna Carson, released in 1969. They released six LPs in the 60s and 70s and seemingly disappeared.

IANTHE JERROLD – The Studio Crime. Dean Street Press, UK, softcover, 2015. Introduction by Curtis Evans. First published by Chapman & Hall, UK, hardcover, 1929. No US edition,

   If you were to go looking for the original British edition of this book, even with a wad of big bills stashed in your wallet, I don’t believe you’d find one. Dean Street Press is one a few recent publishing company who are doing mystery fans a big service in getting literally hordes of Golden Age mysteries back into print, and Curt Evans, a one-time contributor to this blog, has a lot to do with it. (He now has his own blog, which I wholeheartedly recommend to you.)

   Even though there a brief reference in this book to the involvement of amateur detective John Christmas in an earlier case, one having to do with a museum, this is the first of only two of his investigations to make it into print. The second, Dead Man’s Quarry (1930), is also available from Dean Street Press.

   Given this longer than usual introduction, I suppose it would be churlish of me to point out that Christmas is no Wimsey or Poirot, nor is author Ianthe Jerrold (1897-1977) a Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie. The opening is very effective, however, as it describes a party taking place in a cartoonist’s studio on a foggy, foggy night, with several mysterious visitors coming and going from the studio above (including a sinister-looking man in a fez) before the resident there is found dead, with a knife thrust through his heart.

   The dialogue, to me, reads very formal and dated at times, while sheer coincidence mars the telling: with all of London as the setting, too many of the characters are always coming across each other in places where it seems unlikely they should even be. The relationships between them, unraveled slowly as Christmas’s investigation progresses, often seem far-fetched as well.

   But Christmas’s deductions, as explained thoroughly at the end, seem solid enough, and depending on your interest in puzzle stories or not, you may enjoy this one as much as I did.

Bibliographic Notes:   Two other mysteries written by Ianthe Jerrold, but published under her pen name Geraldine Bridgman, have also been reprinted by Dean Street Press: Let Him Lie (1940) and There May Be Danger (1948).

PUSH, NEVADA. ABC / Touchstone Television / LivePlanet Productions, 2002. Cast: Derek Cecil as James Prufrock, Scarlett Chorvat as Mary, Liz Vassey as Dawn, Melora Walters as Grace, Larry Poindexter as Well Dressed Man #1, Steven Culp as Well Dressed Man #2, James Patrick Stuart as Well Dressed Man #3, Raymond J. Barry as Sloman, and Conchata Ferrell as Martha. Created by Ben Affleck and Sean Bailey. Executive Producers: Ben Affleck, Sean Bailey, Matt Damon and Chris Moore. Co-Executive Producer: James Parriott.

***SPOILER WARNING*** All seven episodes are available on YouTube and linked below. You may want to watch the episodes before reading my spoiler filled review. The YouTube copies are not perfect but they are watchable.

   PUSH, NEVADA was an interactive mystery contest meets TWIN PEAKS. Dramatically the series was a conspiracy thriller set in the small town Push, Nevada. As an added gimmick each week the audience could collect clues (one each episode) that would help viewers win over a million dollars.

   In the 5/20/02 issue of “Broadcasting,” their look at the upcoming new fall 2002 season tried to describe the PUSH, NEVADA interactive game, finally writing, “Frankly, ABC couldn’t seem to explain exactly how it works.”

   In the first episode of PUSH, NEVADA co-creator and movie star Ben Affleck spent more time trying to explain the interactive game than the plot of the series. According to Realityworld.com, over 200,000 game players interacted with the series two websites. No links here as the PUSH, NEVADA information is gone from ABC’s website and the pushtimes address is no longer associated with the series.

   If the game didn’t interest the viewer there was the conspiracy thriller, a genre popular at the time with the networks (ALIAS, VERITAS: THE QUEST, and JOHN DOE) but not as much with the mass audience.

“The Amount.” (9/17/02; rerun 9/19/02.) Written by Ben Affleck and Sean Bailey. Directed by John McNaughton. Guest Cast: Jon Polito and Armand Assante. *** IRS agent Jim Prufrock receives a fax from an unknown source revealing there is money missing at a Casino in desert town Push, Nevada. It leads Jim to a shadowy conspiracy and murder.

Episide Clue: 1,045,000. The meaning of the clue was to reveal the amount of the now missing money stolen from the Casino and the amount of the grand prize for the contest.

Ratings: The September 17th showing finished 16th place in the ratings and rerun on September 19th finished 66th.

   It didn’t take long for the series to inspire memories of TWIN PEAKS as we watch the casino vault be robbed by a naked man with a body temperature too low for the thermal camera to see him. But the show lacks the charm and David Lynch to pull such scenes off. Instead PUSH, NEVADA settles for a mix of bizarre characters and a plot that settles into a mystery procedural. While the series mystery is who is behind the corruption in Push, it is the odd characters and their secrets that receive most of the attention.

   There are an endless number of eccentric characters with a secret, but let’s start with the hero, small time IRS agent Jim Prufrock. Obsessive over finding answers, Prufrock succeeds because he won’t stop even when others pay the price. It is hard to care about our hero when he is a self-involved, insensitive, morally righteous, naive, clueless idiot.

   The major characters included Mary, the town femme fatale/whore who works at the Slo-Dance Bar run by local crime boss Dwight Sloman. Sloman answers to big evil company Watermark represented by the three Well-Dressed Men. Jim stays at extremely maternal Martha’s boarding house that is hiding something in a forbidden to enter part of the house.

   My favorite character of the series was Grace. Jim’s devoted secretary and expert on all that is IRS. Grace made Della Street look like a slacker. The acting style for these TWIN PEAK-like conspiracy shows can take the reality out of the character leaving a fictional plot device. Melora Walters’ performance was able to keep Grace human but with the secrets and oddness each character in PUSH, NEVADA required.

“The Black Box” (9/17/02) Written by Ben Affleck and Sean Bailey. Directed by Charles McDougall. *** Jim reports the murder of Silas to the police who with the help of the Well-Dressed Men rule Silas’s death a suicide. Mary seduces out the location of the money and leaves a man to die. The Well-Dressed Men try to understand why the robbers took only some of the money and a bible.

Episode Clue: television

   This episode aired in the series time slot of Thursday at 9pm. It followed the rerun of episode one and finished 46th in the ratings.

   Episode three has the series settled into it Thursday 9pm time slot opposite its normal competition – CBS’ CSI, NBC’s WILL & GRACE and GOOD MORNING MIAMI, FOX’s movie, UPN’s WWE SMACKDOWN, WB’s JAMIE KENNEDY and OFF CENTRE, and PAX’s DIAGNOSIS MURDER.

“The Color Of…” (9/26/02) Written by James Parriott. Directed by Davis Guggenheim. *** Grace discovers no one in Push has filed taxes since the casino was bought 17 years ago. Jim confronts Casino Middle Management Guy with the fact the Casino is paying out 62% of the time. Jim finds the dead body of the man who killed Silas and is arrested for murder.

Episode Clue: orange

Ratings fall to disastrous levels with this episode finishing 83rd.

“Storybook Hero.” (10/3/02) Written by Tom Garrigus. Directed by John Patterson. *** Jim is in jail for murder until someone unknown pays his bail. Sloman learns Mary was involved in the Casino robbery and wants his money back. Grace is suspended for the help she did for Jim. The Well-Dressed Men hunt for the missing bible.

Episode clue: peter pan

Ratings continued down with this episode finishing in 91st place.

   Disney had just bought ABC and ESPN, and they had a plan for quirky PUSH, NEVADA. Broadcast networks were starting to use their cable networks to help market the broadcast network shows. Fox had used FX to rerun 24 and increase viewers’ awareness of the series, something many believed was the reason for 24’s success.

   In “Broadcasting” (10/7/02) Disney head Michael Eisner explained how they wanted to do the same with PUSH, NEVADA by rerunning it on ABC Family. Some of the ABC affiliates objected and with the collapsing ratings it surprised no one when PUSH, NEVADA was cancelled (“Broadcasting” 10/14/02).

   This was an era when it was common for TV series to end without answers or closure for the audience. But there was a twist that made PUSH different – it was a game and legally the game had to finish and award its promised prizes. PUSH, NEVADA and ABC used their websites to help set up the game’s quick ending.

“The Letter of the Law.” (10/10/02) Written by John Serge. Directed by Lisa Cholodenko. *** Grace discovers who bailed out Jim – evil Watermark’s competition. Jim continues to endanger others as he blunders into discovering the secret purpose of the Casino. Clueless Jim is unaware of the missing bible, its apparent importance to some, or that it is now hidden in his room. Mary gives Sloman the money back but Daddy wants more.

Episode clue: g

This episode was 93rd in ratings.

“…….” (10/17/02) Written by Joan Rater and Tony Phelan. Directed by Rodman Flender. *** How Jim’s Dad died and the effect it had on Jim is revealed. Mary has the Bible. The Treasury’s sting to nail Sloman is threatened when Sloman decides to kill Jim. Watermark’s faces exposure by Jim’s relentless efforts.

Episode clue: morse code

Ratings: 100th.

“Jim’s Domain.” (10/24/02) Written by Joan Rater and Tony Phelan. Directed by Nick Gomez. *** Bad guys in Push defeated, Jim returns home a hero but still a naïve idiot. He is surprised to find himself promoted and his wife begging for another chance. But something still haunts him, a question unanswered – who sent him the fax that started all of this?

Episode clue: www.toyota18.com

Ratings for this final episode to air proved relatively few people cared as it finished 90th.

   In the final minute of the last episode the series made a horrible dramatic choice. The fourth wall was broken and Derek Cecil told the audience that what he and the producers thought was just a story for a TV show had turned real and now Watermark was after everyone connected to the PUSH, NEVADA TV series. He claimed he was on the run and gave the clues from the last unaired six episodes. Written on a piece of paper were the words:

FIVE

LONGITUDE

UNDERWEAR

SOUTHEAST

BODNICK

ELIOT

   The final instructions on how to put the clues together appeared October 28th on ABC’s MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL at halftime.

   The instructions were: spaces and punctuation count. Don’t count the first episode. Then 5th place, 1st, 9th, 1st, 5th, 7th, 4th, 1st, 2nd, 7th, 5th, and 2nd in that order. Actor Derek Cecil says, “I am going to have to disappear for awhile. We are being manipulated. Keep up the fight. Good luck.”

   If you take the correct letter from each clue it forms a word. For example the fifth letter from second episode’s clue “television” gives you the letter V. Putting the letters together spelled VONGEYELNAIL. Replace the EYE with I as the sign in MONDAY NIGHT FOOTALL clip’s background suggested and you have VONGILNAIL or phone number 866-445-6245. First to call that number won the million and forty-five thousand dollars prize.

   It took two minutes for the prize to be won. According to RealityWorld.com over 10,000 people solved the puzzle within 24 hours.

   The story’s fourth wall destroying ending betrayed loyal viewers with a cheap gimmick that left unanswered most of the questions and failed to resolve many of the characters’ secrets. But one can forgive the writers who had the impossible task of jamming six episodes of twists, discoveries and surprises into the last moments of the seventh episode and a minute during halftime on MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL.

   Today, loyal viewers are being treated with more respect. Shows such as FOX’s FRINGE, NBC’s CHUCK and CBS’ PERSON OF INTEREST are given a short extra season to bring closure to the series. But this was 2002. It took two minutes for someone to solve the puzzle but those watching PUSH, NEVADA for the story are still waiting for some answers.

FINAL NOTES:

All ratings information came from “Broadcasting”:

http://www.americanradiohistory.co/Broadcasting_Individual_Issues_Guide.htm

   Perhaps the first few items in this month’s column should have gone into the one for last month, which dealt with Georges Simenon, but that one was getting longish and I decided to save a few bits and pieces for a while. First I was going to say a few words about the careless proofreading, most unusual for a Crippen & Landru book, that I discovered in the recent Simenon collection The 13 Culprits. The funniest typo I found is when the name of the juge d’instruction Monsieur Froget is rendered as M. Forget.

   If you’re familiar with the original French titles of various Maigret novels, you probably noticed the similarity between a few of those titles and a few of the short stories about other characters that I discussed last month, and may have wondered whether the novels were expanded versions of those short stories.

   In one case I can answer with a definite No (or should I say Non?) because the short story in question has been translated into English. “Les Flamands” from Les 13 Coupables has no relation to the Maigret novel Chez Les Flamands (1932; first translated as The Flemish Shop) beyond the fact that they both deal with Flemish characters.

   The other title similarities come from collections not translated into English. Are there any connections beyond the titles between “L’écluse no. 14″ from Les 13 Mystéres and the novel L’écluse No. 1 (1933; first translated as The Lock at Charenton), or between “Le chien jaune” (“The Yellow Dog”) from Les 13 Enigmes and the Maigret novel of the same title (1931; first translated as A Face for a Clue)? It’s anyone’s guess but I suspect the answers here are also Non and Non. If any Simenonophile out there knows for sure, please say something.

   I had read A Face for a Clue years ago but happened to pick it up again recently and found that among other things it offers us a credibility sandwich (or should I say a credibility croissant?) that would daunt a Dagwood. The yellow dog of the original title belongs to a Frenchman who was tricked into smuggling dope into the U.S. on his boat and then betrayed to the authorities by his companions in crime and sentenced to a long term in Sing Sing. Would you believe that he got to keep the mutt throughout his time in the slammer? The dog is still with him when he’s released and comes back to France for revenge on his former partners. Yeah, right.

   And yet another “yeah, right” to, of all people, Fred Dannay. In an introduction to the Simenon story he ran in the August 1948 EQMM he tells us that Georges Simenon is a pseudonym and that the author’s real name is Georges Sim! How did Fred come to make this mistake?

   I suspect it dates back to his first meeting with Simenon, which took place in late 1945 or early ‘46, soon after the creator of Maigret left Europe for Montreal and later for the U.S., and is described briefly in the intro to another Simenon story (July 1946). Since Fred spoke very little French and Simenon very little English, the meeting was moderated, as it were, by Simenon’s then agent, who was apparently bilingual. “Your editor’s head swung back and forth between M. Simenon and the interpreter as if we were watching a tennis match at Forest Hills.” Under these conditions any kind of misunderstanding can happen. Remember the telephone game?

   During the years when Fred was first publishing Simenon in translation, he was also running a number of stories by Gerald Kersh (1911-1968), who claimed to have been born in Russia although his actual birthplace was Teddington-on-Thames.

   The protagonist of all the tales Fred ran during the Forties was Karmesin, a huge old East European with a thick Nietzsche mustache who, as Kersh never tires of telling us, is either the world’s greatest criminal or its greatest liar. In each story Karmesin tells Kersh about a super-masterful crime he brought off years before.

   Recently I re-read some of these for the first time in years and discovered that Karmesin often drops various contemptuous East European epithets. One of these is “Ptoo!” Another, which interested me more, is “Pfui!” That of course is also a favorite word of crime fiction’s premier character of East European descent: Nero Wolfe.

   I began wondering which of these two was first with the word and, checking my back issues of EQMM, discovered that Karmesin began using the P word in his very first exploit, published simply as “Karmesin” in the London Evening Standard for May 19, 1936 and reprinted in EQMM for April 1948 as “Karmesin, Bank Robber.”

   Did Nero Wolfe use the word earlier than 1936? Rex Stout wrote only two Wolfe novels that preceded Karmesin’s debut: Fer-de-Lance (1934) and The League of Frightened Men (1935). If anyone cares to go through those titles on a Pfui hunt, please let us know. Either way it’s most likely that neither author knew of the other at the time the Pfuis began pflying, but I’m still curious.

   Veteran readers of this column will remember my long-standing interest in that useful and sweet-singing little amphibian known to biologists as bufo bufo and to the rest of us as the toad. For no rational reason, the toad has long been the most hated animal in literature, and mystery writers have not been immune to anti-bufonism.

   In five separate and distinct novels written fairly close together, Robert B. Parker had his PI Spenser describe someone as looking like a — yeah, you guessed it. Re-reading Gerald Kersh’s Karmesin stories, I discovered that in one of them, first published as “Karmesin and the Big Flea” (Courier, Winter 1938-39) and reprinted in EQMM for July 1949 as “Karmesin, Blackmailer,” our master criminal’s adversary is a certain Captain Crapaud. Anyone know what crapaud means in English? You guessed it again. Pfui!

   In Chapter 14 of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister (1949) Philip Marlowe encounters a character named Joseph P. Toad, who looks like Sydney Greenstreet but converses in toughguyspeak. Parker may hold the prize for insulting toads most often but Kersh and Chandler seem to be the only crime writers who actually gave that name to a character. Double Pfui! And a hearty Ptoo! for good measure.

Best known for her Grammy-winning “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine,” here’s a song from Gale Garnett’s second LP, Lovin’ Place (1965) :