YOUNG FURY. Paramount Pictures, 1965. Rory Calhoun, Virginia Mayo, William Bendix, Lon Chaney [Jr.], Richard Arlen, John Agar, Preston Pierce, Jody McCrea, Merry Anders. Story & screenplay: Steve Fisher. Producer: A. C. Lyles. Director: Christian Nyby.

   An outlaw who’s turned against his former gang (Rory Calhoun) returns to his hometown to make a stand against them, but in the meantime his son (Preston Pierce), having grown up alone, has formed his own gang of hooligans, and his burning desire is to spit in his father’s face for deserting him.

   This mixture of the standard western with the juvenile delinquent saga of the 50’s misses on almost all cylinders, Richard Arlen, as the stalwart but luckless sheriff, might be pleased with his role in this movie, but except for William Bendix in a cameo part, nobody else.

PostScript:   William Bendix died in 1964, and this was his last movie role. He played both dim-witted villains and comedy roles with equal ease. I can’t think of anyone who did it better.

KEITH LAUMER – The Other Side of Time. Imperium agent Brion Bayard #2. Berkley F1129, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1965. Signet, paperback, November 1972. Collected in Beyond the Imperium (Tor, paperback, 1981) with Assignment in Nowhere (1968). Also collected in Imperium (Baen, paperback, 2005) by adding Worlds of the Imperium (1962) to the preceding volume. First hardcover edition: Walker, 1971. Originally serialized in Fantastic Stories, April-June 1965.

   From the title you might expect this to be a time-travel novel, and it is, but only in a way. What it really is is a novel of parallel universes, each separated from the other by the slimmest fabric of branched-off possibilities. What the world ruled by the Imperiumis is is an alternate Earth, one in which subtle differences between that world and ours are slowly but surely designed to be picked up on. (The time travel aspect comes in when it is discovered that in some parallel universes time travels at a different rate than it does in others.)

   It might be best to read Worlds of Imperium, the first in the series, before tackling this one. The Other Side of Time is a mapcap adventure in time and space that starts out in high gear and then notches the action up every two or three chapters along the way. What leading protagonist Bryon Bayard, based in Stockholm Zero-Zero, learns almost at once is that his world is being invaded by the orge-ish creatures called the Hagroon, and unless he does something about it, he will be the only one who survives. The rest of the books consists of him fighting a one-man resistance against the invaders, and as he does so, getting tossed this way and that in world after world, sometimes a captive and sometimes an utterly abandoned castaway.

   As a man of some endurance and ingenuity, Bayard is a MacGyver of his time times ten. It is a lot of fun seeing him juryrigging a shuttle based on a box and a few magnetic coils and setting off across a space-time continuum otherwise completely impossible to fathom — except in the imagination of an author like Keith Laumer.

   I cannot do better than to quote directly from page 152 of the Signet edition:

J. F. BURKE – Location Shots. New York: Harper & Row, hardcover, 1974. Charter, paperback, 1980.

   This is the first of three medium-hard-boiled detective novels featuring Sam Kelly, the resident house dick at the Hotel Castlereagh on Seventy-second Street in Manhattan. Kelly is black, bald, and forty — one of the more recent black series detectives in crime fiction. His girlfriend is Madam Bobbie, a voluptuous blonde who lives in the hotel across the square, the Charmain Towers — but her girls do most of their work out of the Castlereagh.

   As this book opens, Sam and Madam Bobbie are awakened in her apartment by police sirens. They discover that the street in front of both hotels is full of cops, and Sam goes down to investigate. As it turns out, a woman in room 8A of Kelly’s hotel, Anna Jensen, was murdered during the night. Kelly knows for a fact that a friend of his, David Christopher, who lived in 9A, was a “friend” of the dead woman’s, but when he goes to 9A, he finds his friend dead as well.

   At odds with Commander Fuseli, the cop in charge, Sam also finds himself involved with characters indigenous only to New York, as well as talking birds and a search for a manuscript and a tape recording that might lead to the killer.

   Burke uses the city of New York so well that it virtually becomes another character in this novel and in the subsequent books in the series. Sam Kelly is also featured in Death Trick (1975) and Kelly Among the Nightingales (1979).

         ———
   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.

Bibliographic Note:   Burke also wrote two books about a nightclub pianist named Joe Streeter: The Kama Sutra Tango (Harper, 1977) and Crazy Woman Blues (Dutton, 1978).

MAN WITHOUT A STAR. Universal International, 1955. Kirk Douglas, Jeanne Crain, Claire Trevor, William Campbell, Richard Boone, Jay C. Flippen, Screenplay by Borden Chase & D. D. Beauchamp, based on a novel by Dee Linford (1952). Director: King Vidol.

   It starts off promising enough. Frankie Lane’s title song plays while we see a black train belching billows of smoke into a blue Western sky as it traverses a long barren landscape. The theme soon becomes obvious, that of how fencing in grassland with barbed wire represents the beginning of the end for the Old West. All indications are that the primary story Man Without a Star is designed to tell is that of one man’s unfruitful quest to battle the forces of technological progress as it advances across the frontier.

   Problem is: the movie loses this central focus and, as it drifts further away from what could have been a unifying them, it ends up being more of a mixed-up muddled affair that doesn’t pack nearly the punch of the movie it should have.

   Kirk Douglas portrays Dempsey Rae, a cowboy from Texas who has made his way out to Wyoming to work as a cowhand. His reason for leaving Texas is simple: he doesn’t like barbed wire and the concomitant range wars that arise when greedy ranchers use it to claim grassland as their own. So, along with Jeff Jimson (William Campbell), his newfound green young friend that he takes under his wing, Dempsey goes to work for lady ranch owner Reed Bowman (Jeanne Crain). Soon enough Dempsey discovers that Reed’s rivals are using barbed wire to enclose their grassland. From then on, it’s game on. Dempsey is going to side with his new employer and lover.

   Soon enough, however, Dempsey realizes that the seductive Reed is just as much a scoundrel as any avaricious male rancher. Case in point is her hiring of gunslinger Steve Miles (Richard Boone) to put the squeeze on her rivals. Before long, Dempsey’s world is turned upside down. His new friend Jeff betrays him, Reed deserts him, and he’s working for the ranchers who are using barbed wire – the stuff he hates more than anything else in the world.

   Nothing in this movie ever gels. There are too many subplots and thematic elements that are raised but which are never fully explored, thus detracting from the movie’s would-be central theme, that a single man attempting to outrun the closing of the American frontier.

   For instance, there’s the introduction of Idonee (Claire Trevor), a local madam who seemingly has known Dempsey for many years. The film doesn’t exactly know what to do with her, so she appears, then disappears, then comes back again to play the role of Dempsey’s personal savior. Similarly, the father-son cycle of life relationship between Dempsey and Jeff seems artificial and forced.

   Then there’s the case of the murder that takes place in the opening minutes of the film, in which an itinerant traveler on the same train as Dempsey and Jeff kills a man. The murder, along with the introduction of the town’s sheriff to investigate the crime when the train comes to a halt, just happens and never comes up again.

   This is my main criticism of Man Without a Star. A lot of stuff just happens, making the movie, despite a solid performance by Douglas, a bit too formulaic for its own good.

KATHERINE HALL PAGE – Murder in the Belfry. Faith Fairchild #1. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1990. Avon, paperback, 1991.

   Finding the body is [the former] Faith Sibley, displaced New Yorker and now the wife of a minister in a small New England town. The dead girl has been president of the Young People’s Club, but she was also a blackmailer, and worse — and somebody probably wanted her stopped.

   At first this is a “let’s solve a murder — it’ll be such fun” type of book, but when the dead girl’s innocent boy friend is suspected, a real reason for finding the killer emerges. Unfortunately Faith stumbles onto the truth almost by accident, spoiling the ending more than a little.

[UPDATE.] Faith Sibley’s married name is Faith Fairchild, and this is how she is known throughout the rest of series. If you has asked me in 1990 when I wrote this review how many books would end up being in the series, I’m sure I’d have said three or four. I believe that was the standard publishers contract at the time for a new series. Unless the books and the leading characters caught on, and for Katherine Hall Page, I’m happy to say that they did. See for yourself:

      The Faith Fairchild series —

1. The Body in the Belfry (1990)
2. The Body in the Kelp (1990)
3. The Body in the Bouillon (1991)
4. The Body in the Vestibule (1992)
5. The Body in the Cast (1993)
6. The Body in the Basement (1994)
7. The Body in the Bog (1996; aka The Body in the Marsh)
8. The Body in the Fjord (1997)
9. The Body in the Bookcase (1998)
10. The Body in the Big Apple (1999)
11. The Body in the Moonlight (2001)
12. The Body In The Bonfire (2002)
13. The Body in the Lighthouse (2003)
14. The Body in the Attic (2004)
15. The Body in the Snowdrift (2005)
16. The Body in the Ivy (2006)
17. The Body in the Gallery (2008)
18. The Body in the Sleigh (2009)
19. The Body in the Gazebo (2011)
20. The Body in the Boudoir (2012)
21. The Body in the Piazza (2013)
22. The Body in the Birches (2015)
23. The Body in the Wardrobe (2016)
24. The Body in the Casket (2017)

KRISTEN LEPIONKA – The Last Place You Look. Roxane Weary #1. Minotair Books, hardcover, June 2017.

First Sentence: “Matt said you find things. For a living,” the woman said on the phone.

   Roxane — one ‘n’ — has a reputation for being good at finding things. Danielle Stockton’s brother, Bradford, is two months away from his execution date after being convicted for murdering the parents of a girl no one has seen since the crime. Danielle believes she saw her recently, and she wants Roxane to find her and prove her brother’s innocence.

   What a pleasure to have a book whose story starts at the beginning and goes straight through to the end. What a pleasure to have a book you definitely don’t want to put down until the last page is done.

   Lepioinka has created a fascinating character in Roxane. She is a wonderful study in contrasts with a complicated personal life. A fair amount of time is spent focusing on her family and relationships which lays the foundation for our getting to know this well-drawn, fully-developed character. It creates a strong enough interest that one really wants to know what will happen to her, both in this book , and in the future. Yet, while Roxane takes center stage, those around her hold their own as well.

   With every setting, a strong sense of place is created— “The previous tenant had painted spirited colors in every room: a dark, shiny teal in the office, burnt orange in the bathroom, chocolate-brown walls and red cabinets in the kitchen, cornflower blue in the long hallway that ran the length of the apartment.” —which orients one to the character.

   Even better is the author’s well-done, unforced dialogue— “He slid one of the shot glasses to me and held his up. ‘Friends don’t let friends order cocktails invented by social-media interns.'”

   The suspense starts quietly, subtly, and builds at a good pace with red herrings along with way. The body count also increases and includes a good twist. The author is very good at having you follow the character down a path only to discover it’s the wrong path.

   The Last Place You Look has an excellent protagonist, and a breath-catching climax. It’s a book one wants to read in one sitting, and an author one may wish to follow.

ROBERT B. PARKER – Walking Shadow. Spenser #21. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1994. Berkley, paperback, 1995.

   What in the world is left for me or anyone to say about Parker, Spenser. Hawk, Susan and the whole menagerie? At his best Parker writes some of the smoothest prose the field has seen, and at his worst is so pretentious he’s embarrassing and devises plots you wouldn’t wish on Mack Bolan. I guess the suspense is in seeing which one you get this time out.

   Spenser is drawn into the world of theater when Susan, on the theater’s board, drags him to a small Massachusetts town to see an avant-garde play. It develops that the producer is being followed by a person unknown, feels threatened, and wants Spenser to find out why. For Susan’s sake he agrees, but before he can find out anything, a cast member is murdered.

   The town has a large Chinese population, and Spenser is visited by one of them and two Vietnamese gang members who encourage him to stay away. This is a signal to bring in Hawk and get serious about things.

   This could be sub-titled “Three Against the Tong,” and that should tell you all you need to know about what kind of story it is. Parker has created a fantasy-land here, his own little Oz, with a manly hero who knows T. S. Eliot and has not only stone killers (two of them this time) but every sort of cop at this beck and call when he needs aid, and an oh-so-understanding lady with a precious dog to boot.

   He’s only going through the motions now, though granted, they’re smooth motions. He writes effortless prose still, but it’s all moves and no punch. It’s slick, it’s superficial, it’s kind of silly, really, and it’s the literary equivalent of week-old stew. If this were a paperback original from a new author, I might be a little more tolerant — but it isn’t. I’m afraid Parker’s just about played out his string.

MAX ALLAN COLLINS – The Baby Blue Rip-Off. Mallory #1. Walker, hardcover, 1983. Tor, paperback, November 1987.

   It takes a while in this, Mallory’s first appearance, for details of who he is to be filled in. But as the story goes on, we learn that is is an ex-Viet Nam vet as well as a former cop, and is now beginning a career as a mystery writer. He’s also just moved back to the small home town of Port City, Iowa. (By the end of the book, though, his first name is still not known, at least by me.)

   The book begins as he describes how he’s been inveigled by a girl friend (who then almost immediately splits on him) into volunteering as a Meals on Wheels delivery person for the elderly. This may be a first (and only?) as an occupation for the leading character in a mystery novel.

   But what this does is to serve as a means for Mallory to get involved in his first case of actual murder. When he arrives at the home of one of the elderly women on his route, he finds a gang of thieves ransacking the place, and worse, he discovers the woman herself tied to a chair and very much dead.

   Besides taking her death as personal affront and deciding to find the ones responsible on his own, he also gets involved with an old flame from high school who now needs his help. One thing leads to another in that regard as well.

   Collins tells the story in a nice breezy tone that’s as comfortable as an old pair of shoes, with more than a bit of nostalgia mixed in. It’s also very well plotted — three solid reasons why I’m hooked and will go on to read the rest of series as soon as I can. There were four more. See below:

       The Mallory series —

1. The Baby Blue Rip-Off (1982)
2. No Cure for Death (1983)
3. Kill Your Darlings (1984)
4. A Shroud for Aquarius (1985)
5. Nice Weekend for a Murder (1986)

DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID. Universal Pictures, 1982. Steve Martin, Rachel Ward, Carl Reiner, Reni Santoni. In archival footage: Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Brian Donlevy, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Burt Lancaster, Charles Laughton, Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland, Edmond O’Brien, Vincent Price, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner and more. Screenplay: Carl Reiner, George Gipe & Steve Martin. Director: Carl Reiner.

   Laughter is contagious. Watching a comedy film in a theater with a few hundred other people is one thing. Even if the comedy is not so hot, if one person starts laughing at a scene, no matter how lame it is, you may find yourself laughing too. You can’t help yourself.

   It’s why the TV networks came up with the idea of laugh tracks, and that was a long time ago.

   Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is another kettle of fish altogether. I watched this one on DVD with only one other person watching with me, and I found myself laughing out loud any number of times. I couldn’t help myself. This does not happen often.

   I can’t say that this would happen to everyone. Some people can’t watch black and white movies. I can understand that. It’s difficult for me to watch silent movies. Some people don’t care for noir movies from the 40s. That I don’t understand, but there’s no accounting for tastes.

   Steve Martin plays a 1940s Sam Spade kind of private eye in this one, a guy named Rigby Reardon, and he’s hired by a beautiful dame (Ranchel Ward) who hires him to investigate the reported death of her father in a car accident along a deserted mountain highway. From that point on, there’s no real need to explain what happens (because I can’t), but surprisingly enough, I’m willing to wager that it actually makes sense.

   For what is interspersed with the case that Rigby Reardon is working on are archival clips from maybe a dozen film noir movies from the 40s, sliced in perfectly to not only move the story along but to also fit in as smooth as silk with whatever comic antics Steve Martin is doing on screen, including voice-over narration.

   I’m sure all of you know this already, and each of you has your own personal favorite scenes. But speaking personally, if I may, I think this film is a work of genius, and if by chance you have never seen it but you have read this far into the review, you absolutely should. See it, that is. Don’t deprive yourself any longer.

   Remember MGM-TV’s THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.? It was one of the most successful of the many quasi-spy series that flooded prime time in the wake of the early James Bond movies. The stars were Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo and David McCallum as Illya Kuryakin, with Leo G. Carroll as their boss, Alexander Waverly. The series ran for four seasons (1964-68), the first in black-and white and the remaining three in color.

   I began law school at around the time U.N.C.L.E. debuted but, despite a grueling study schedule, managed to catch most of the first season’s episodes, which were reasonably serious with lots of action. Once the series switched to color it also switched to spoofery and camp. I stopped watching.

   But millions stuck with Solo and Illya, and once the ratings showed that U.N.C.L.E. was a hit, MGM-TV commissioned a series of tie-in novels, 23 in all, the first of which was written by Michael Avallone (1924-1999). I had no interest in junk paperbacks but in 1970, when I moved to East Brunswick, New Jersey and was working as a Legal Aid attorney, I discovered that my apartment was only a few blocks from Avallone’s house and called him.

   That was the beginning of a weird off-and-on relationship that lasted till his death. Before becoming a neighbor of his I had known very little about him, but after we met I began to collect his books, of which there were dozens. Many of them were movie or TV tie-in novels for which he was paid around $2,000 apiece and which he ground out on his smoking typewriter in a few days or a week. I don’t recall reading any of these, but I did get him to sign them and squirreled them away.

   After my wife died and I moved into a condo, I segregated all the tie-in books and put them into a cabinet with sliding doors which were generally kept closed. A couple of months ago I happened to open one of those doors and, since the books were arranged alphabetically by author, discovered a bunch of Avallone that I’d never read, including that MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. novel and two tie-ins from the unsuccessful spin-off series THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E. (1967-68), which starred Stefanie Powers as April Dancer and Noel Harrison as Mark Slate. I decided it was time to tackle the trio.

   Avallone’s great contribution to pop culture was the Avalloneism. You can’t pick up any of his 200-odd books without finding yourself awash in lines you’d swear couldn’t possibly have been published. But they were. Thousands of them. Small wonder that I soon began to think of Avallone as the Ed Wood of the written word. These three tie-in books offer further proof that my name for him was not off the mark.

   In THE THOUSAND COFFINS AFFAIR (Ace pb #G-553, 1965) Solo and Illya fly to a remote German village to find out what diabolical device killed an U.N.C.L.E. scientist while in his tub and why, just before dying, he put on his clothes backwards.

   It’s no surprise that the culprit is a minion of the evil agency THRUSH, a villain called Golgotha who comes straight out of the Weird Menace pulps of Avallone’s teens. Solo solves the puzzle when he remembers that the dead man was a mystery nut with a particular fondness for Ellery Queen—and that one of the best known Queen novels, THE CHINESE ORANGE MYSTERY (1934), had to do with a corpse who was also dressed backwards.

   Someone, quite possibly Avallone himself, called the book to the attention of Fred Dannay, who was half of the Ellery Queen collaboration and the closest to a grandfather I’ve ever known. A number of years after the incident Fred told me that he’d been furious with Avallone for having given away the raison d’être of the CHINESE ORANGE puzzle. But Avallone couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. Hadn’t he promoted Queen? In a paperback that sold a gazillion copies, hadn’t he plugged one of the most famous EQ titles?

   Whether the book really sold that well remains a mystery. In later years Avallone publicly accused the publisher of having cheated him out of huge royalties. The name in the copyright notice is MGM-TV, and most likely he wrote it as a work made for hire, earning a flat fee and no more. In any event Ace had nothing more to do with him. But a year later, when MGM-TV launched the GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E. series and made a tie-in book deal with another publisher, it was Avallone who was tapped to write the first two entries, the only ones that appeared in the U.S. although three more came out in England.

   More than half a century has passed between the time Avallone’s contributions to the U.N.C.L.E. saga appeared and the time I pulled them out of my sliding-doored cabinet and read them. I was not disappointed.

   First let’s take THE THOUSAND COFFINS AFFAIR, which should have won an Edgar had there been such an award for largest number of words misspelled. In a mere 160 pages we encounter such gems as propellor, esconced, earthern (twice!), jodphurs and cemetary. We are also treated to butchered German locutions like dumbkopf, Vast ist?, Seig heil! and nicht yahr.

   Illya’s patronymic or middle name, never given in the TV series, is rendered as Nickovetch, which is gibberish. (The genuine Russian name closest to Avallone’s invention is Nicolaievitch, which I happen to know only because it was the patronymic or middle name of Tolstoy.) And there’s hardly a page without at least one juicy Avalloneism. I will show mercy and offer only a handful, complete with page references.

   There was something damnedably odd— (19)

   The mechanized bug shot over the road, whipping like the mechanical rabbit at a quinella. (41)

   Stewart Fromes’ ten stiff naked toes wore no shoes. (57)

   Jerry Terry said “Oh!” and that was all. For Napoleon Solo, it said it all. Oh, indeed. (82)

   Like a dead fish, Solo’s right arm fell to his side. (100)

   The unexpected was always likely to happen when you least expected it. (140)

   When we turn to the second and third of Avallone’s contributions to the saga we find more of the same. THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E. #1: THE BIRDS OF A FEATHER AFFAIR (Signet pb #D3012, 1966) not only recycles some of the misspellings like propellor and esconced, it describes one of the bad guys as both a Hindu and a Sikh.

   On one page he’s killed by a bullet in the back of the neck and on the very next page we are told that “[b]lood from his blasted skull dripped to the floor.” As if those gaffes weren’t enough, Stefanie Powers’ first name is spelled wrong on the front cover. (That one we have to chalk up to Signet.)

   Storywise it’s typical Avallone, with first Slate and then Dancer kidnapped by THRUSH in a plot to swap them for a top enemy scientist, who claims to have discovered the secret of eternal life and is being held at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. It turns out that the scientist has an identical double who’s operating as a mole inside the good guys’ stronghold but no one in U.N.C.L.E. suspects they might be twin brothers as in fact they are.

   At one point while April Dancer is being held prisoner, a THRUSH man relieves her of “her handbag, personal effects, and even her bra (without having had to undress her).” Neat trick if you can pull it off!

   Of Avalloneisms the book has no shortage. This time I’ll limit myself to five.

   Noise echoed around the room, gobbling up echoes. (20)

   â€œYou’re a fool,” the redhead hissed. (23)

   His kindly brown eyes were unaccustomably grim. (69)

   Her bra, taut from immersion, was strangling her breasts. (72)

   The whipsaw wore a long green velvet dress. (80)

   Tugs and seagoing freighters mooed like enormous cows in the harbor. (103)

   Whoops! Was that six? Just goes to show that quoting from Avallone is habit-forming.

   THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E. #2: THE BLAZING AFFAIR (Signet pb #D3042, 1966), in which Stefanie Powers’ name is again misspelled on the front cover, pits our heroic agents against an organization calling itself TORCH and described on the back cover as “so fantastically evil it puts THRUSH to shame!”

   April begins by foiling an assassination plot in the Ruritanian kingdom of Ostarkia, then joins Slate in Budapest before the two of them go on to Johannesburg on the trail of a TORCH scheme to fund its plans for world domination with South African diamonds. There seem to be fewer Avalloneisms this time around, but those that survived the Signet editorial process, such as it was, are choice.

   Kurt’s beady eyes roved between them, not sure what they were talking about, not certain as to exactly what to do next. (59)

   The colt in the chair was straining at the leash now. (69)

   The man with the withered face frowned a frownless frown. (71)

   Like so many little men wanting to be bigger than they ever really were in the first place. (126)

   In case I’ve whetted your appetite and you’re determined to read more of these cubic zirconia without visiting your shelves or a secondhand bookstore, I’ve put together a much more extensive catalogue from the trilogy, again complete with page references, which I’ve provided because I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m making this stuff up. You’ll find the bonanza of boners by clicking HERE. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!