BENJAMIN SCHUTZ – A Fistful of Empty. Leo Haggerty #5. Viking, hardcover, 1991. No paperback edition.
I missed this when it came out, and I think it must have gone out of print in two weeks. I’ve been hunting a copy for over a year, and finally found one.
Leo Haggerty chooses to honor an obligation to help his bounty-hunter buddy, Arnie Kendall, bring in a particularly repellent skinhead felon, instead of meeting his love as she asks him to do, even though she says it’s important. When he finally gets home, he finds her raped and brutally beaten, and the home and office trashed. He calls Arnie for help, only to find that he has been murdered.
His quest to find out who, and why, and to exact revenge, make up the story. I’s also about Haggerty learning who he is, and who he can and cannot be. Hard lessons, tough exam.
This is heavy, grim stuff. The Haggerty books have been among the more violent of the current PI crop, and this is no exception. Schutz is a good writer, and tells a fast-moving and gripping story. If you like ’em dark and mean, you could do much worse than this. If you don’t, pass.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #6, March 1993
The Leo Haggerty series —
Embrace the Wolf (1985)
All the Old Bargains (1985)
A Tax in Blood (1987)
The Things We Do For Love (1989)
A Fistful of Empty (1991)
Mexico Is Forever (1994)
Mary, Mary, Shut the Door (2005). (Collection: includes three Haggerty stories, a “Sean and Matt Ellis” story, plus a Philip Marlowe pastiche, “The Black-Eyed Blonde.”)
BRADLEY SPINELLI – The Painted Gun. Akashic Books, trade paperback, March 2017.
The author’s previous book, Killing Williamsburg, was called by someone, “… the first visionary neo-Romantic novel of the twenty-first century,†and there’s the problem right there.
This one is a surreal take on Chandler with an overabundance of plot and almost no understanding of what Chandler, Hammett, and the original Hard Boiled school of writers were trying to do in the first place, the equivalent of trying to write the great New York novel and setting it in Manhattan, Kansas.
What we have, is David “Itchy†Crane, a knebbish who runs an information consultancy business, not exactly likely to crack the Fortune 400 since it is 1997 and the age of the Internet has begun. Alcoholic ex-reporter Itchy gets an offer of $50,000 dollars from a shady eye to find a missing girl named Ashley who painted a portrait of Itchy having never met him.
So far so good. Itchy starts on the trail and of course the cops try to scare him off, goons beat him up, and he’s framed — none too believably — for the murders of a Guatemalan hitman. Itchy has to get tough then and find the girl and clear his name.
The problem is Itchy is never for a moment believable. Despite the fact that Spinelli can write, and there are good bits in the book, he makes the mistake of most writers with no grasp of what Chandler and Hammett were trying to do with the language of the crime novel — he concentrates on what the words say, and not whether they sound authentic..
He almost lost me on page one with this overheated bit of sophistry disguised as a metaphor:
“By 4:19 the cigarette was burning out in the brown glass ashtray, sending a lone last tendril of smoke in a sacred mission to the ceiling.â€
“Sacred mission� What the hell is he talking about? And so it goes, by turns a fair dinkum Chandler imitation then turning into once of Eliot Paul’s absurdist Dadaesque mysteries, then gaudy pulpese, and too arty by half, then … well some of it I can’t describe.
I didn’t and don’t dislike the book, only that despite one blurb calling the plot a “Swiss watch†that “explodes like an RPG.†It’s simply too much and too little at the same time.
Of Ashley’s artist biography, It “… read like a ransom note from another dimension.â€
It doesn’t help it’s 1997, and Itchy sounds as if he fell out of bus in 1950 and cracked his noggin open absorbing a slightly distorted version of Spillanese.
“His face was a pinched melon of embarrassment …†Again, what the hell does that mean?
“…Al wasn’t a cautious kind of guy. He threw the door open and, not seeing anyone, stuck his fat face out. I shoved my .45 into his pug nose.â€
“… a plump blonde was waiting, wearing glasses with the geeky black-plastic birth-control frames that had inexplicably come into fashion forty years after never having been fashionable in the first place ..†Who works that hard for a metaphor and a wise crack? At times I could swear Spinelli is trying out for a chapter in a third volume of Bill Pronzini’s Gun in Cheek series.
Other times he reverts to a stream of consciousness that makes no sense, as this one while he is having sex in a parked car: “Better times, before the alcoholism began to take its crippling toll, when I still fantasized about winning a Pulitzer, when Herb Caen was still alive and kicking, on the page and off, before he died and I wasn’t even invited to the wake.†That isn’t even a sentence really.
Thomas Pynchon did this better, so did Thomas Berger and Jonathan Lethem, and they managed surreal and absurdist without prose that stops you dead on the page like a grammatical stubbed toe.
There are good things about the book. Itchy had potential as the protagonist, the essential mystery when you get down to it makes more sense than many of Chandler’s, there is a pretty good ending, and surprisingly he is good on dialogue. I just wish he hadn’t made me work so hard getting there. All I could think reading it was, this is why Thomas Wolfe needed Maxwell Perkins.
And they aren’t all misfires:
“There are always birds chirping in the trees, strange, alien birdsongs, and on the rocks, near the lake, the sporadic skitter of lizards.â€
You can believe the man that wrote that read his Chandler and maybe his Macdonald as well.
ROBERT BLOCH – The King of Terrors. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1977. No paperback edition.
Robert Bloch has long been recognized as the patriarch macabre fiction writers, having made his first professional sale half a century ago (to Weird Tales in 1934, at tender age of seventeen). But he has also written extensively in the criminous field, with several novels, hundreds of short stories. and five major collections.
The King of Terrors, subtitled “Tales of Madness and Death,” collects the best of his many short works on the theme of psychopathology. “Throughout man’s history,” Bloch says in his introduction, “I suppose death was the King of Terrors. The ultimate threat to our egos is the thought of their extinction. Now we have recently come to learn that mental illness can also destroy the ego, rob s of our self-awareness and, thus, identity. In a word — living death, the King of Terrors’ tortured twin.”
That tortured twin makes for some truly fearful and fear-filled tales. “The Real Bad Friend,” for instance, which covers some of the same psychopathological ground as Bloch’s classic novel Psycho and predates the book by two years; “Water’s Edge,” a deceptively simple story about an excon and a woman’s horrifying retribution against him; and a pair of beautifully understated shockers- “Home Away from Home,” about a young woman’s ill-advised visit to her psychiatrist uncle in a remote section England, and “Terror in the Night,” about a young man’s escape from an insane asylum. Not all the stories here are first-rate-Bloch — but all are enjoyable and the best ones are truly shuddersome.
Bloch’s other criminous collections are also recommended. (It should be noted, however, that there is considerable duplication of stories among them.) They are Terror in the Night and Other Stories (1958), Blood Runs Cold (1961), Cold Chills (1977), and Out of the Mouths of Graves (1978).
ROBERT BLOCH “The Chaney Legacy.” First published in Night Cry, Fall 1986. Reprinted many times, including Witches & Warlocks, edited by Marvin Kaye (SF Book Club, hardcover, 1990).
How does an actor become a monster? What method does an actor have to utilize, what magic must they conjure up in order to become a cinematic fiend? Bela Lugosi didn’t just portray Dracula; he became Dracula. What about Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre? How did they become the characters they portrayed? And what of Lon Chaney, the famed silent film star who portrayed monsters, grotesque villains and strange looking men?
That’s the obsession plaguing a character named Dale in Robert Bloch’s gripping and creepy little tale, “The Chaney Legacy.†Dale, a researcher of Hollywood lore, is faced with a choice: does he decide to live in a Hollywood Hills bungalow once inhabited by Chaney or does he maintain his romantic relationship with a local broadcaster named Debbie Curzon. True to his obsession with Chaney and the late actor’s films, Dale chooses the house.
As any fable reminds us, it can be dangerous to pursue a question and a line of inquiry to its rightful conclusion. In his obsessive quest to understand how Chaney became the characters he portrayed, Dale stumbles upon a secret that would have better been left in the past. The secret comes in the form of a makeup kit with a mirror, the very makeup kit that Chaney apparently utilized to “become†the characters he portrayed in the silent films.
But as any good student of horror fiction knows, sometimes secrets are dangerous. That’s definitely the case in this sublimely bizarre short story by Robert Bloch. Recommended for horror fiction and film fans alike.
GEORGE BAXT – The Neon Graveyard. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1979. Intl. Polygonics Ltd., paperback, 1989.
This is Baxt’s first mystery novel in some time, and the title fits perfectly. It’s flashy, it’s rotten to the core, and it’s terribly depressing. What the title actually refers to is the city of Hollywood, USA, and maybe you’re way ahead of me.
As a novel of the utterly bizarre, it comes equipped with all the essentials, including a clonish retread of Mae West, a gorilla who acts as her bodyguard, and a castle of orgies so vile that even federal investigators are forced to sit up and take notice.
The not-so-surprising lesson to be learned from all this is that decadence per se can carry a mystery story only so far. The humor may be called biting and sardonic by some, but the truth of the matter is that while detective story readers are given a lot to swallow here, there’s really no way they can avoid starving to death on the food for thought that Baxt totally fails to provide.
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 4, No. 2, March-April 1980 (slightly revised).
Note: There was a seven year gap between Baxt’s previous mystery novel, Burning Sappho, and The Neon Graveyard, and it was another five years before he wrote The Dorothy Parker Murder Case, the first of a series of many “movie star” mysteries, all of which I believe I can safely recommend over this one.
THE BROKEN STAR. United Artists, 1956. Howard Duff, Lita Baron, Bill Williams, Douglas Fowley, Henry Calvin, Addison Richards, Joel Ashley, John Pickard, Joe Dominguez. Written by John C. Higgins. Directed by Lesley Selander.
Back in the late 1940s, John C. Higgins wrote some memorable film noir scripts turned into riveting movies by Anthony Mann: T-Men, Raw Deal, Railroaded and Border Incident, as well as He Walked by Night. In the 50s, his output became more variable with things like Shield for Murder, The Black Sleep and Untamed Youth, capped off in the mid-60s by Robinson Crusoe on Mars. And somewhere in and among these he recycled his Shield for Murder script into a Western called The Broken Star.
This opens with Deputy Sheriff Howard Duff scoping out an illicit money drop used by the local cattle baron to store his ill-gotten goodies; which, it seems, are also ill-guarded by a lone Mexican who passes quickly and noisily out of the story when Duff guns him down and makes it look like self-defense.
But when Duff stashes the loot and gives his story to his boss (Addison Richards) he’s met with professional skepticism. Richards sends Deputy Bill Williams out to investigate the scene, where he (Wiliams) runs into two goons — excuse me: owlhoots — in the employ of the Cattle Baron, who wants his ill-guarded gains gotten back.
Meanwhile Duff has his own problems with the murdered man’s sister: a fiery Mexican Maiden who sings in the local saloon and does a specialty number with a whip. (We’ve all had relationships like that, haven’t we?) The kind of girl I used to date in college. Before long, the hired goons/owlhoots have summoned Duff to a meeting with Mister Big/Cattle Baron, a genial and unsavory sort who reminds one of Sydney Greenstreet or perhaps Robert Emhardt in Underworld USA, squeezing the local ranchers in between hosting barbecues and making threats while calling the steps at a square dance. And when he smiles and tells Howie he wants his money back, we know the jig is up.
What follows however is a bit of a mess. The goons kidnap Lita, Howard fights them, Deputy Bill fights them, they kidnap Litas again, Bill fights them again, Howard fights Bill, Howard tries to grab the loot and hit the trail and the whole thing ends up pretty much as we knew it would. In a proper film noir our doomed protagonist would have ended up bleeding in a gutter desperately groping for escape, but here we get a rather protracted shoot-out in an abandoned mine, with everyone jockeying for position and the loot.
Director Lesley Selander helmed some fine shoot-’em-ups in his day, including some of the best of the Hopalong Cassidy series, but he has little feel for this sort of thing, and it shows. Douglas Fowley does what he can as a ratty little double-crosser (a specialty of his) but beyond that and an elaborate saloon fight, the action seems a bit perfunctory, the sense of fatality that’s so much a part of noir is totally lacking, and a film that could have been a fine successor to movies like Ramrod and Pursued just sort of wastes its time — and ours.
By the way, Mister Big/the Cattle Baron here seemed awfully familiar to me, sort of a nasty Jonathan Winters type, and it took me a while but I finally placed the actor who portrays him; it’s Henry Calvin, best remembered by viewers my age as Sergeant Garcia in Disney’s TV show Zorro.
OLIVER BLEECK – The Brass Go-Between. William Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1969. Pocket, paperback, 1971. Perennial Library, paperback, 1983. Warner, paperback, 1993.
Ross Thomas uses the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck for his entertaining Philip St. Ives books. These are fast-paced stories with first-person narration, reminiscent of many private-detective novels. But St. Ives is not a detective, he is a professional go-between — that is, he acts as an intermediary between such parties as kidnappers and the kidnap victim’s family, insurance companies and thieves, etc. He has built a reputation in this strange profession and people on both sides of the law seem to trust him.
In The Brass Go-Between, the first book of the series, he is dealing with the Conker Museum in Washington, D.C., attempting to recover a huge brass shield that has been stolen from the museum’s Pan-African collection. But there is more to the shield than meets the eye. Not only is it historically priceless, it is also a magnificent work of art. Add to this the fact that at least two opposing African nations claim rightful ownership, and it becomes obvious many people would like to discover the whereabouts of the shield.
Naturally, all this complicates St. Ives’s job as he encounters many of the interested parties along the way: Winfield Spencer, a rich and reclusive art collector; and Conception Mbwato, a giant emissary from the African nation of Komporeen, to name but two.
This and the other Oliver Bleeck titles — Protocol for a Kidnapping (1971), The Procane Chronicle (1972), The Highbinders (1974), and No Questions Asked (1976) — are distinguished for their crisp dialogue, unusual background and understated sense of irony. Qualities, of course, that Thomas also infuses into his novels published under his own name.
THE AMAZING MR. CALLAGHAN. French, 1955. Originally released as À toi de jouer Callaghan!. Also released in the US by Atlantis Films as Your Turn to Play, Callaghan. Tony Wright, Lisianne Rei, Colette Ripert, Robert Burnier, Robert Berni, Paul Cambo. Written and directed by Willie Rozier. based on the novel Sorry You’ve Been Troubled by Peter Cheyney.
The success of Meet Mr. Callaghan and the hit theme from that film, plus the success of Peter Cheyney’s novels in the famed Serie Noire series of paperbacks in France was enough to inspire a series of films based on his work. Since it was Slim Callaghan who first made his way to the screen in England, so he appears here in the guise of Tony Wright, replete with the theme from the British film, outfitted with French lyrics and whistled off and on by the star.
There is little about the blonde muscular Wright to suggest the slender character with dark messy hair and shabby suits from the Cheyney novels, and the adaptation of Sorry You’ve Been Troubled moves the action to the Riviera in 1955, where Slim is arriving to aid an English Colonel whose note for gambling losses is held by a none-too- honest casino.
With help from his pal Windy Nicholls (Robert Burnier), here an older man than Slim unlike the books where he is a young Canadian, Slim sets him up as an American who needs to be skinned by a crooked Vicomte (Robert Berni) in with the boss and club owner (Paul Cambo). Unfortunately first thing out of the box he is recognized and has to fight for his life out of the villa housing the private club.
From there on the action is fast and furious, as Slim seduces one beautiful girl involved in the ring after another, manages several underwater scenes to show off Wright’s physique and swimming skills, and plays the bad guys for suckers until the big showdown, a well done car-chase and a minor surprise reveal of the man behind it all. It’s lucky for Slim that he gets along with the French police much better than he does Scotland Yard.
All of this is played for comedy for the most part, right down to Wright and Rei singing a duet in his sports car before the last clench, a trope that carried over into Eddie Constantine’s Lemmy Caution films.
Wright played Slim in one earlier film in that same year, A Whiskey for Callaghan (based on It Couldn’t Matter Less), and once more in 1963. In 1957 Eddie Constantine made at least one Slim Callaghan film before taking on the role of suave wise cracking FBI undercover agent Lemme Caution.
The Callaghan films are hard to find, but this one is available in French on YouTube and included below. You might take a look for yourself, it’s pretty self-explanatory, and there is some fun to be had, though Wright lacks the smirk and style — as well as the singing voice — of Constantine.
DEBORAH CROMBIE – A Share in Death. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1993. Berkley, paperback, 1994. Avon, paperback; 1st printing, September 2003.
A Share in Death is the first of now 17 books in author Deborah Crombie series of mysteries solved by the Scotland Yard pairing of Supt. Duncan Kincaid and his assistant, Sgt. Gemma James. Although there are two brutal deaths that occur in it, it would best to describe it as a cozy, I’m sorry to say, with many of the negative connotations that that might imply.
If you can’t have a manor house snowed in and full of guests for the holidays, the next best thing might be a timeshare vacation resort filled with strangers to each other, which is exactly where Kincaid is heading for a week’s worth well-deserved rest. He’s there totally incognito, but you as well as I know exactly how long that’s going to last.
Worse, there is another. A elderly lady having memory problems tries to tell Kincaid about something she has seen, but they are interrupted, and Kincaid doesn’t bother getting back to her. Until, of course, it is too late, and there is a second victim, and you don’t get even a single chance to guess who.
Even worse. The solution comes from nowhere — at least from nothing the reader was privy to. On page 244 Kincaid thinks back to a conversation he had overheard on page 55 (the Avon edition), puts two and two together and comes up with five because we the reader weren’t told everything that transpired in that aforesaid conversation.
I hate it when that happens.
And if Kincaid had heard what he is supposed to have heard on page 55, he should have known exactly whodunit by page 56.
Maybe I missed something, and you can certainly correct me if I’m wrong, but at least one reviewer of this book on Goodreads points out the same thing.
