DEBORAH CROMBIE – A Share in Death. Duncan Kincaid #1. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1993. Berkley, paperback, 1994. Avon, paperback, 2003.
This is a first novel set in England, by an ex-resident of Scotland now living in Texas; an intriguing mix. Newly promoted Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid of Scotland Yard is on a well-earned vacation at a cousin’s timeshare in the north of England.
As oft seems to happen to vacationing cops, he has scarcely unpacked his bags when murder is committed — the assistant manager is electrocuted in the spa. The overbearing local head cop wants to call it suicide (for no good reason that I could see) but Duncan knows better. Sure enough it wasn’t, and sure enough there’s another murder, and sure enough Duncan lands right in the middle of it — which the local hates.
This is a good, solid British village mystery. It breaks no new ground, but is well written, and for a first novel, exceptionally so. Kincaid is an engaging protagonist, and his Sergeant, Gemma James, shows promise as well. I found all of the characters believable for the most part, and sharply delineated.
Crombie had Kincaid semi-yearning after every good-looking woman in the story, which I thought was a bit of an unnecessary tease, but that was my only kvetch. The plot was probably the weakest link in the chain, but even that was no worse than average. All told, I read few first novels that show this much promise.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #6, March 1993.
Bibliographic Notes: Barry’s judgment was very much correct. A Share in Death was given Agatha and Macavity nominations for Best First Novel of 1993. With publication of The Garden of Lamentations next year, there will be 17 books in the Duncan Kincaid / Gemma James series.
Beth Hart is one of those singers you wonder why she is not more famous. There seems to be an endless number of her songs on YouTube. It is hard to pick just one to play. Her range and genres of music is as wide as her voice is impressive, from her Janis Joplin-like rock (“Am I the One”) to the pop of “My California,” from soul songs such as “Halfway to Heaven” to the Tom Waits cover “Chocolate Jesus,” from blues (“Baddest Blues”) to jazz (“Jazz Man”). But this is what I picked, from her album Screaming for My Supper:
THE BLACK WHIP. 20th Century Fox, 1956. Hugh Marlowe, Coleen Gray, Adele Mara, Angie Dickinson, Paul Richards, Richard Gilden, Sheb Wooley, Strother Martin. Director: Charles Marquis Warren.
One reviewer on IMDb says, as someone there so often does, that this is a movie that is so bad, it’s enjoyable. Well, no. It’s mediocre — not bad — and it’s dull, ill-conceived, indifferently directed, and if those are your criteria for enjoying a movie, then maybe it is.
There is the potential. Oops, make that the past tense. It’s too late now. A veiled lady in black helps one of the “black legs,” a gang of ex-confederate raiders, escape from jail. Her face is covered, but she must be one of four local dance hall girls, all of whom are summarily shipped out of town on a wagon to a town where no one else wants them, either.
Staying temporarily at a remote transfer station for the local stagecoach line, they and the two brothers who run it are taken prisoner by the black leg gang, led by a suitably villainous Paul Richards, the man with a whip, not a gun.
But the bad guys do not have a plan, only a goal, and that is to kidnap the governor coming in by stage, force him to grant them pardons, and make their getaway. Nothing else they do makes more sense than pouring water in your boot, as my granddaddy used to say, especially when it comes down to the final confrontation.
The two brothers have their issues, the four dance house ladies are pretty, but other than Coleen Gray, who has fallen in love with one of the brothers (Hugh Marlowe), apparently at first sight, they have little to do. The younger brother (Richard Gilden) is as green as all get out, and not very interesting. Perhaps there was some potential here, but what what appears on the screen is strictly sub-standard stuff. See paragraph one.
MARCIA MULLER & BILL PRONZINI – Double. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1984. Mysterious Press, paperback, September 1995.
I think that this may be the first novel co-authored by two MWA Grand Masters, but even so, my next thought was that perhaps it doesn’t count, since they weren’t Grand Masters when they wrote it. No, that’s nitpicking, I told myself. Of course it counts.
Double is told in alternating chapters by their best known series characters, Bill’s “Nameless” PI and Marcia’s Sharon McCone. They’re both attending a private investigators’ convention in San Diego, when (of course) they come across several suspicious events, including the supposed suicide (by jumping) of a former mentor of McCone’s.
Neither of them has a client, but neither can either of them sit back and let the police have all the fun. And reading this book is fun, with many a chapter ending as a cliffhanger, with the other character immediately taking over, totally unaware of what straits the previous author had left his or her fellow investigator.
This must have a book that was fun to write as well, but even I as a reader can tell what challenges the authors had to face and overcome to make it work as well as it does. Incidentally, while neither character spends much time at the PI convention, they do see in passing there a female PI based in Santa Teresa, plus a couple of gents named Brock Callahan and Miles Jacoby, among others.
BETTY ROWLANDS – Exhaustive Enquiries. Walker, US, hardcover, 1994. Berkley, paperback, April 1995. First published in the UK: Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1993.
This is the fourth of twelve books in Berry Rowlands’ series of real life cases of murder solved by mystery writer Melissa Craig. The first appeared in 1990 when the author was 67; the final one in 2004. By that time, however, the sixth in her series of novels featuring police photographer Sukey Reynolds had appeared. There are now thirteen in that series, the most recent appearing in 2014.
I wonder what she eats for breakfast.
This the first I’ve read of any of her work. It falls into what I call the classical British cozy category, which is to say it is set in the beautiful English countryside, complete with a large manor house converted to a public inn — with ghosts reportedly residing in the cellar — and a protagonist (female) with just enough reason to get involved with mysteries — she writes them — plus a boy friend of sorts who is a member of the local police force, and a good friend (also female) next door to bounce ideas off of, if not share adventures with.
All well and good, but what this particular sample of her work also is is a good old-fashioned thriller, complete with a gang of thieves who are busy smuggling something in or out of the country in the phony exhaust systems of automobiles. (Hence the title.)
All in all, it’s minor affair, but it gets rougher and tougher than American cozies tend to do, albeit in a semi-sanitized way. Enjoyable enough to read, but in a couple of hours, you’ll be hungry again.
JOHN BRUNNER – Wear the Butchers’ Medal. Pocket 50129, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1965. Film:How I Spent My Summer Vacation. Made for TV. Universal/NBC-TV; telecast 07 Jan 1967. Robert Wagner, Jill St. John, Peter Lawford, Lola Albright, Walter Pidgeon, Michael Ansara. Teleplay: Gene R. Kearney. Director: William Hale.
Before he became a major writer in the Science Fiction and Fantasy field with books such as The Sheep Look Up, The Complete Traveler in Black, and his masterwork, Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner tried his hand at many genres, not the least the thriller, not surprising since thriller elements appear in many of his works, especially those with a near future setting. Wear the Butchers’ Medal appeared in this country first in 1965 as a Pocket Book original, with a nice Harry Bennett cover.
It opens with a brief note that the murder of a man selling guns to the Algerian FLN, who was found with a Swastika painted on the wall of a Gasthof near the body in Switzerland, inspired the book. It seems a bit strange that should make it pertinent now in the 21st century, but with the rise of European nationalism and Middle Eastern terrorism, it is.
Our hero is Phil Burns, an American student on a walking holiday in Europe, who accepts a ride to DÈ•sseldorf from a stranger at a gas station. Before he can think, he is offered a large sum of money by the man, Max Moritz, to deliver a wristwatch to his brother in England, and then as they pass a workman in the road flame shoots out, the car wrecks and his benefactor is dead.
There’s an attempt on Burns’ life in London, a macabre adventure in a German nightclub, and finally a quaint village in Bavaria where long buried secrets are rising to the surface, bearing strange fruit including a threat to the world at large.
Of course, there is a pretty girl, Angela, who is a Cypriot fleeing the trouble there who works in London for Moritz and his partner, good and bad men, not always who they seem to be, plenty of near misses, escapes, confusion, and all the other standard fare of the thriller, sub genus Nazi revival variety, are present. The writing is assured, the characters attractive or frightening as called for, and the descriptions of the countryside and settings masterful. The suspense is well maintained and the set-pieces all pay off, so there are no complaints.
It’s a solid well written thriller of the era made more interesting by who wrote it, modern European politics, and the film it inspired.
I reviewed How I Spent My Summer Vacationhere earlier on this blog. I won’t go into it, save I was surprised to find it was based on a novel by John Brunner or that I missed that all these years.
Outside of the basic set up of an American student on a European vacation becoming involved in a budding fascist plot, there isn’t a lot of similarity between the rather dark novel and the much more lighthearted made for television movie. The hero of the novel is much more self-assured than the character played by Robert Wagner in the film.
If you like Brunner’s work, or the genre, the book is well worth reading. If not in the first rank of thrillers of the period, it shows where Brunner might have gone in another genre had we not lost him to science fiction, and, if you like the film, it is an interesting sidelight on that.
This is the fifth mystery novel in which inveterate birdwatcher George Palmer-Jones has become involved with solving a murder. It shouldn’t be too surprising: even though he’s now actually a retired civil servant, he and his wife Molly have become partners in an “enquiry agency” to keep themselves busy in their declining years.
George hates the term “private detective,” but there is no escaping it: “enquiry agent” or PI, that’s the kind of work they do. George has birds on his mind most of the time, however, and if it weren’t for Molly to push him, I think his business would be nothing at all, in no time flat.
They’re hired to trace a wayward son who refuses to come home, or to acknowledge the existence of his worried parents in any way. That he is also an ardent birdwatcher makes the Palmer-Joneses the ideal couple to track him down. They catch up to him momentarily on a sea cruise/birdwatching expedition, but almost as quickly they lose him at the hands of a killer.
Murder at sea means a limited number of suspects, and this is classical detection at very nearly its most overwrought, with little annoying hints of what is yet to come and a (female) police inspector who finds her own life very nearly exploding out of control.
Don’t get me wrong, though. While this may not be the equivalent of John Dickson Carr in plot complexity, it is a pleasant voyage through waters charted several times or more. Every time I take the trip, I enjoy it just about as much as the time before, and that’s the kind of book this is.
— This review first appeared in Deadly Pleasures, Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter 1993 .
The Palmer-Jones series —
1. A Bird In The Hand (1986)
2. Come Death and High Water (1987)
3. Murder In Paradise (1988)
4. A Prey To Murder (1989)
5. Sea Fever (1991)
6. Another Man’s Poison (1992)
7. The Mill On The Shore (1994)
8. High Island Blues (1996)
THE KILLING. United Artists, 1956. Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Ted DeCorsia, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Joe Sawyer. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, with additional dialogue by Jim Thompson; based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White. Director: Stanley Kubrick.
Much has been written about The Killing, one of Stanley Kubrick’s earliest films and the template for the crime film subgenre known as the “heist film.†In many ways, the story at the heart of this crime film — a ragtag group of men planning the perfect heist of a betting track — is less important than the way in which the story is told.
From the voiceover narration, which lends the movie a semi-documentary feel, to the reverse chronology in which certain key events in the unfolding story are depicted, Kubrick’s movie is revolutionary in the manner in which it frequently shifts the perspective from which the viewer engages with what is happening on screen.
At first look, the movie’s protagonist/anti-hero is Sterling Hayden’s character, Johnny Clay. He’s a career criminal, once imprisoned at Alcatraz. Most significantly, he’s the brains of the whole operation to steal from a horse racetrack — an institution that is inherently suspect as it gains its money from the desperate and the downtrodden hoping to turn their money into even larger gains. (A heist film where the target was an honest, family owned restaurant, for instance, wouldn’t generate much interest, I suspect.)
Back to Johnny Clay, both the brawn and the brains. It was his idea to gather a group of men, including an old friend (Jay C. Flippen), a corrupt policeman (Ted De Corsia) and a chess playing wrestler (Kola Kwariani) as well as an off-kilter sharpshooter (a perfectly cast Timothy Carey) to pull off the job. He’s also got men on the inside: bartender Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer) and George Peatty (Elisha Cook, Jr.), a betting room teller.
I mentioned George Peatty last for a reason, for in many respects, it is Elisha Cook’s portrayal of a downtrodden cuckold that carries the film’s story from its desperate but oddly optimistic beginning to its violently tragic, albeit humorous, climax. It’s Johnny Clay’s story that makes The Killing a crime film. It’s George Peatty’s that makes the movie a film noir.
Some five to ten minutes into the movie (I don’t remember exactly), The Killing shifts its visual focus from Hayden’s character and the preparations for the crime to the marital squabbles between George Peatty and his witty, albeit sarcastic and emotionally abusive wife Sherry (Marie Windsor). The scene in which we see the two Peattys bicker, with Sherry hurling cruel verbal jabs at her sad sack of a husband lingers longer than one might expect.
It’s just the two of them in an apartment bedroom, with Sherry complaining that she married George thinking that one day he’d hit it rich. He’s truly in love with her, but she has next to no respect for him — a point further highlighted when it’s revealed that she’s cheating on him with a total sleaze named Val Cannon (Vince Edwards) whom she freely tells that George is part of a scheme to rob the racetrack. George may be thinking of obtaining illicit money to keep Sherry, but Sherry is thinking of taking George’s money to keep her illicit lover.
If this all sounds like a standard double cross scenario, it’s because it is. And it’s this melodramatic aspect to the film, when combined with Johnny Clay’s quest for the perfect heist that makes The Killing not just a crime film, but also a film noir with tragic qualities.
What makes this Kubrick film a particularly durable work is that the behavior on display here is merely instantly recognizable aspects of human behavior enhanced for dramatic effect. Johnny is a career criminal and a cynic, and while Sterling Hayden’s character is cool and full of swagger, he’s not all that interesting.
The same cannot be said about George (Cook in a standout role, one in which his eyes reveal the depth of his soul). He’s a weak man who wants so badly to please his wife that he’s willing to commit a felony to do so and it’s his story — from his pathetic entreaties to his wife at the very beginning to his willingness (Spoiler Alert) to cut her down in cold blood — that makes The Killing a fascinating look into human greed and urban despair.
