ESCAPE TO ATHENA. ITC Films, UK, 1979. Roger Moore, Telly Savalas, David Niven, Stefanie Powers, Claudia Cardinale, Richard Roundtree, Sonny Bono, Elliott Gould. Director: George P. Cosmatos.

   In the past several years of writing movie reviews, I’m more than certain I’ve used the word “uneven” to describe a movie. In fact, I’m sure I’ve used it fairly often, because let’s face it: a lot of movies are uneven. Some are even “highly uneven.” But nothing prepared me for the unevenness exhibited in the comedy/war film/adventure film mash-up that is Escape to Athena.

   Take the first half hour of this movie, for example. It’s a cross between a gritty WW2 thriller and a lighthearted imitation of Hogan’s Heroes.

   A bunch of Americans, as well as an Italian cook and British scholar, are being held captive in a German prison camp on a Greek island. The stalag commandant, Major Otto Hecht (Roger Moore) utilizes his prisoners’ free labor to dig up ancient Greek artifacts. Soon enough, he’s got two more prisoners on his hands: two recently captured USO performers, the wisecracking Charlie (Elliott Gould) and his traveling companion Dottie (Stefanie Powers). Gould plays it for laughs, more than once speaking in Yiddish. Mel Brooks was able to pull this type of balancing act off. It simply doesn’t work here.

   As far as the gritty thriller aspect, that’s also a focal point of the film’s first half-hour. Those scenes feel as if they were set in a different cinematic universe entirely. In the local town on the same Greek island, local resistance leader Zeno (Telly Savalas) is hoping to prevent the SS from executing more civilians. The contrast between these rather downbeat sequences and the lighthearted humorous (although decidedly not funny) moments in the stalag could not be greater.

   But somehow, despite all expectations on my part, the two distinctly different films eventually mesh into one somewhat enjoyable action film, following Zeno as he begins to work with the escapees from the prison camp to stop the Nazis from repelling an Allied invasion. Unfortunately, it takes about an hour until there’s a consistent tone to the movie. At that point, Escape to Athena becomes a standard action film, albeit one with an extraordinarily well-filmed motorcycle chase through the narrow alleyways of Rhodes.

   A couple of final thoughts. (1) Roger Moore, while always a delight to see on the screen, is not well cast in his role as a German officer. His faux accent isn’t convincing anyone and (2) Lalo Schifrin’s score, which includes Greek influenced renditions of American patriotic tunes, works quite well. It is one of the things that is consistently good in this otherwise extremely uneven film.

NICK PETRIE – Burning Bright. Peter Ash #2. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, January 2017; trade paperback, May 2017; premium-sized paperback, July 2017.

   L. J. Roberts reviewed the first in the Peter Ash series, The Drifter, on this blog not too long ago, and she liked it well enough that I remembered it when I spotted this, the second in the series, very soon thereafter. A short excerpt of the third, Light It Up, is included at the end of the premium-sized paperback edition of the second, the one I’ve just finished reading.

   It took me well over a week of short snippets of nighttime just-before-turning-put-the-light reading to finish it. It’s over 450 pages of small print, and for most of the time it took, I enjoyed it.

   Peter Ash, sufferer of PTSD from his career in the Iran and Afghanistan wars, cannot bear to be indoors, among other problems, and that was the primary focus of the first book, as I understand it. Luckily a good deal of the second book takes place outdoors, starting with an escape from some bad guys hunting a feisty young woman named June who is hiding out in the top of a redwood forest.

   Those particular bad guys end up dead, but there are of course many more where they came from. Their goal is to get their hands on an Artificial Intelligence program June’s mother was working on before he death in what was at first called a hit-and-run accident.

   Peter is also very much attracted to June, the lady Tarzan of the redwood forest, and their adventures together run smoothly for quite a while. The ending, though, is disappointing. It’s muddled, wraps itself up far too quickly, and seriously, the bad guys never stood a chance.

   The book is otherwise well-written, and there were long stretches where the pages simply fly by. The series ought to do well, but I see only limited potential for any growth for Peter Ash as a character. There is no mystery left in him, in other words, and while I’d be more than happy to be surprised, I think the one book is all I will need.

JOHN BUCHAN – The 39 Steps. William Blackwood & Sons, UK, hardcover, 1915. Serialized in in Blackwood’s Magazine, UK, July-December 1915, under the pseudonym “H de V.” Previously serialized in All-Story Weekly, US, June 5 & 12, 1915. George H. Doran Co., US, hardcover, 1916. Houghton Mifflin, US, hardcover, 1919. Pocket #69, US, paperback, 1940. Reprinted many times since, and still in print today.

   One of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films was The 39 Steps, which he took from John Buchan’s excellent adventure/spy novel. While Hitchcock’s 1935 film differs in many details and mechanisms from the book, both artists mined the same vein, and it’s easy to see what made Hitchcock want to work his transformations on this tale.

   The romantic figure of the hero, Richard Hannay, is the perfect early example of the soldier of fortune. He’s sound of wind and limb, he’s courageous and slightly bored, and he is catapulted by treachery into facing a vast conspiracy that can determine the fate of the world. The writing doesn’t contain too much character to clutter up the plot, and there are no female roles in this adventure. (Hitchcock injected character into the story, partly by including female players in the game.)

   Hannay sets out on the chase, first to hide out from the police, who want him for murder, and also from the German villains who want to stop the secret from getting out. By ruse and disguise, he traverses the well-described wilds of Scotland to stay undercover until the fatal hour. Falling in and out of the clutches of his facile fate, he enlists help as he runs, is chased by airplane, and is captured by his adversaries. This is where James Bond came from.

   The Scottish author John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir, was also a political official and governor-general of Canada. He wrote many books of history and biography, as well as other adventures, which he called “shockers.” The best of the other Hannay books is Greenmantle (1916). Another hero, Leithen, is featured in other stories, and Buchan is powerfully descriptive of southern Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

         ———
   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.

MURDER ON THE WATERFRONT. Warner Brothers, 1943. Warren Douglas, Joan Winfield, John Loder, Ruth Ford, Bill Crago, Bill Kennedy. Director: B. Reeves Eason.

   A no-name cast, and it matches the script. An inventor of a new type of thermostat for the Navy is murdered, and a mysterious “rajah,” one of a group of entertainers brought down to the shipyard, is suspected. It turns out that he was court-martialed years earlier, and Mr. Lewis (that’s the inventor’s name) was one of those who testified against him.

   Several hand grenades, stabbings, shootings and general high jinks later, the case is solved, but which one of the many navy personnel is was, I couldn’t say. They all looked alike to me. (Obviously it wasn’t the rajah, mostly because that would be too obvious.) It may be a cliché, but it’s true. They certainly don’t make movies like this any more.

BLACKMAIL. Republic Pictures, 1947. William Marshall, Adele Mara, Ricardo Cortez, Grant Withers, Stephanie Bachelor, Richard Fraser, Roy Barcroft, George J. Lewis, Tristam Coffin, Eva Novak. Screenplay: Royal K. Cole & Albert deMond, based on the story “Stock Shot” by Robert Leslie Bellem in the July 1944 issue of Speed Detective. (Added later; see comments.) Director: Lesley Selander.

   So, the folks over at Republic, acquire this story by Robert Leslie Bellem about none other than our pal Dan Turner, the Hollywood Detective, he of the colorful patter and the dames falling at his feet and mostly out of what clothes they are barely wearing, inspiring some of the most outrageous euphemisms for the female anatomy in the history of the English language.

   Assuming it is the English language. With Dan Turner you can’t be sure.

   Anyway, here is our Dan (William Marshall) sporting the moniker Daniel J. Turner, a New York Eye imported to Hollywood to work for big time playboy Ziggy Cranston (Ricardo Cortez, and no relation to Lamont) who owns among other assets a radio network.

   Seems Ziggy has been playing with some rough types, and he is so scared he even pulls a gun on Dan. Lucky for Ziggy, Dan is playing nice and doesn’t slug him the way he did Ziggy’s chauffeur who tried to crease Dan’s pork pie with a wrench by way of greeting.

   Everybody is on edge but Dan, and you don’t want to get Dan on edge.

   Turns out Ziggy is a playboy first class, and somebody is blackmailing him claiming to have evidence he murdered a singer of the very female type. Ziggy swears the chanteuse wasn’t killed by him, but he wants the blackmailer off his back and can’t afford the bad publicity.

   Even though Dan has traveled across the country, he’s not so sure he wants to get involved. Too bad for him, the blackmailers already figure he is involved and would like to do something permanent about that.

   Like six feet under permanent.

   As you might expect, Dan is soon up to his eyebrows in wise cracks, fists, and dames like classy Sylvia Duane (Adele Mara) plus hoods with names like Spice Kellaway, Blue Chip Winslow, and Pinky (Roy Barcroft, George J. Lewis, and Tristam Coffin), a Pepe Le Peu named Antoine le Blanc (Richard Fraser) and a tough cop named Donaldson who would like Dan to quit shooting up the local hoodlums and go back to New York.

   Not our Dan though. Not when Ziggy is arrested for yet another murder, and only Dan has the grey matter needed to untwist the tangled web of who murdered whom and why, and drive Donaldson batty too.

   It’s a pretty fast paced affair you might enjoy if you take off your size twelves and sit back with a bourbon and chaser to ease you over the bumpy parts. The screenplay at least tries to capture something of Dan’s colorful badinage, and if the dames aren’t quite as pneumatic as those in Mr. Bellem’s stories, well, those models didn’t come along until a few years later with the likes of MM, Jayne, Diana D, and Mamie.

   The Marshall guy tries hard, and at times almost succeeds though he’s plenty vanilla for a guy as colorful as Dan Turner. And it is a Republic picture so the fights are first class. Nobody can fault a Republic stuntman when it comes to action.

   But I have to admit I sure wish the censor had shut his sensitive little ears and let Dan riff on some of his favorite anatomical assets. That Bellem music is unique like Krupa on the drums or Harry James on the horn, and this little cinema masterpiece could sure use it, hard as it tries.

LAWRENCE BLOCK – The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams. Bernie Rhodenbarr #6. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1994. Onyx, paperback; 1st printing, June 1995.

   It’d been a long time since I’d read a “Bernie,” and a long time since Block had written one. Bernie, the bookloving burglar and bookstore owner, has been all books and no burgle for a while now. He’s even acquired a cat for his Greenwich Village store.

   His dormant flagitious proclivities are re-awakened, however, when a new landlord proposes to raise his rent to stratospheric heights. Before you know it, Bernie has burgled and bumped into a body in a bathroom. He evades detection for this one, but through a series of events too tortuous to detail here, is arrested for another heist, one involving a valuable set of baseball trading cards. And he didn’t do it.

   Block is one of the very few authors (the master is of course Donald Westlake) who can switch voices convincingly. From Matthew Scudder to Bernie Rhodenbarr is a mighty leap, but Block makes it with ease. I’m not familiar enough with earlier “Bernie” books to make comparisons, but I can tell you that the old cast of characters is here — his lesbian friend, his larceny-minded police nemesis, and his jogging lawyer.

   This really isn’t my type of book, but one would have to be illiterate not to realize that Block does it very very well. Not as well as Westlake at his best, I think; there are stretches where Bock seems to get carried away with his own cleverness and takes several pages for scenes that could have been accomplished admirably in one.

   It’s filled with puns and clever writing, though, and has a zanily convoluted plot that will keep you guessing until the end. I enjoyed it, and if I did, those of you who like this sort of romp to begin with are going to absolutely love it.

GUN MOLL. Million Dollar Productions, 1938. Also released as Gang Smashers. Nina Mae McKinney, Laurence Criner, Monte Hawley and Mantan Moreland. Written by Ralph Cooper and Hazel Barsworth. Produced by Harry M. Popkin. Directed by Leo C. Popkin.

   This one surprised me.

   Readers who hang on to my every word will know I’m a big fan of all sorts of strange movies, including those made decades ago with all-black casts for all-black audiences, back when segregation was more tangible than it is today. There’s a lot of raw talent in these films, showcasing performers like Mantan Moreland, Bill Robinson, Herb Jeffries, Ethel Waters, Clarence Muse… I could go on, but you get the idea.

   Unfortunately the fine talent is often obscured by poor production values and technical teams unfamiliar with technique: poor sound, bad lighting and amateurish acting are the order of the day for these films, shot on schedules and budgets that would have defeated even the lowest of low-budget Hollywood producers.

   Imagine my surprise then, when I discovered Gun Moll, a cheap but near-professional effort produced by none other than Harry M. Popkin, very early in his career. And again, those readers who weep with delight at my smile will recall immediately my review of Champagne for Caesar where I singled Producer Popkin out for praise: his other efforts include And Then There Were None, D.O.A. and The Thief, but he got his start out there on the ragged edge of film-making, doing films the establishment ignored or despised.

   And doing them well. Gun Moll crackles with the sort of pace one associates with the early Warners gangster pics. Beautiful Nina Mae McKinney stars as an investigator working undercover as a singer in the nightclub used by gang boss Monte Hawley as a front for his Protection Racket — which gives her an excuse to provide some fine musical interludes backed by a snappy jazz band, while sneaking about the place doing whatever undercover gals do in the movies.

   About this time Laurence Criner shows up in the George Raft part as a hired gun on loan from another gang, and if you can’t guess that he’s really another Under Cover Man, well you’re in good company because Ms. McKinney doesn’t tumble either.

   Years later this was used in a Claire Trevor / Fred MacMurray film, but that’s a review for another time. Suffice it to say that things fall into place just in time for a well-paced chase scene followed by a Cagney-esque slug fest, done with the kind of vigor and professionalism that normally graces much bigger-budgeted movies.

   In fact, Gun Moll is marked by assured handling and effects normally reserved for more respectable movies, tricked out with stylish montages, clever editing and a sense of pace all too rare in B movies. And of course it languished unnoticed as producer Popkin moved on to bigger and (frankly) better things.

   But I’ll always have a soft spot for this one.

D. B. OLSEN – The Cat Saw Murder. Rachel & Jennifer Murdock #1. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1939. Dell #35, paperback, mapback edition, no date stated.

   Although this is the second case for Lt. Mayhew, his first being The Clue in the Clay (Phoenix Press, 1938), this is the book that introduced Rachel Murdock (and only briefly in this one, her sister Jennifer) to the world of mystery fiction. And for someone who’s 70 years old, Rachel is active and agile, with a sharp, inquisitive mind.

   It’s her niece whom she’s come to visit, and her niece who is the victim of bloody murder, with a whole rooming house full of suspects. And of course there is a cat. The whole story is told with gaps and holes, however, and it’s all muddled up in grand old fashion.

[PLOT WARNING] And it’s the gaps and holes that I’ll be discussing from this point onward, and while I don’t intend to tell you whodunit, I am going to tell you more details of the plot than I would if this were a more ordinary review. Let’s go point by point:

   (1) I suppose one cat could be switched with another, and the owner would never be able to tell the difference right away, but it doesn’t seem likely to me that such a masquerade could be pulled off for very long. On page 126, at any rate, Miss Rachel expresses doubts to Lt. Mayhew that her cat Samantha is really the cat she’s always had. “No,” she told him slowly. “I’m not sure.” End of chapter.

   Whether or not she could be taken in by somebody else’s cat, when the next chapter begins, this small piece of the plot is totally ignored — no questions, no immediate followup, no anything — and it’s page 208 before it’s brought up again, when Rachel decides to test the possibility that the cat’s fur has been dyed.

   (2) The same kind of maneuver takes place at the end of Chapter 17. Miss Rachel is questioning Clara, a small girl who lives in the house, and Clara says she knows “Something happened the night the lady died.” She won’t tell Rachel, though, not until she’s promised a kitty of her own. End of chapter.

   The next chapter begins, nothing is mentioned, and it isn’t for another 20 pages that Miss Rachel decides to get serious about it. Then she promises Clara a kitty, and they all discover that the girl saw someone leaving the dead woman’s apartment that night with a bloody axe in her hand. This is not what I call terrific detective work.

   (3) Mayhew is not really a slouch as a detective, since he did get alibis from everyone in the house immediately after the murder — and it was pretty good work to establish that it was an inside job so quickly — but then why does it take him until page 235 to start cross-checking those alibis, and then until page 244 before he starts out on the footwork needed to verify them?

   (4) I don’t understand this one at all. On page 118 he sets up a trap for the killer with a girl he is starting to get sweet on. “I’ll be watching,” he tells her on the same page. On page 127, he’s woken up from his vigil to find Sara in the process of being strangled in the room across the hall. He taps gently on the door and asks, “Is everything all right” The girl’s half dead, and he’s tapping gently on the door.

   (5) In Chapter 16 the girl’s mother tries to commit suicide. Why? I don’t know. She’s rescued in the nick of time, and the matter’s never mentioned again.

   (6) The man across the hall from the murdered woman has disappears, but Mayhew finds a note with the word CAVES written on it hidden inside a shoe. Does he suspect that there are caves in the area where the man will eventually be dug up? Nope. Is that where he’s found? Yep.

   (7) You’re going to think I’m screwy, but I enjoyed the book anyway, and I’d read the next in the series any time at all. You figure it out.

Bibliographic Notes:   Lt. Stephen Mayhew appeared in seven of D. B. Olsen’s detective novels, five of them overlapping the mystery adventures of Rachel and Jennifer Murdock, who appeared together in 13 novels between 1939 and 1956, all of which featured cats in the title.

   As for D. B. Olsen, she may be better known today under her real name, Dolores Hitchens, which starting in 1952 she used as the byline for 20 later novels, sometimes in tandem with her husband Bert, that were not nearly as cozy as the Olsen books were.

EDWARD D. HOCH – All But Impossible: The Impossible Files of Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Crippen & Landru, hardcover/softcover, 2017. Story collection, with all 15 reprinted from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Edited by Douglas G. Greene, including a memoir by the latter.

   When it comes to stories with solid mystery plotting, you really can’t go wrong with those by the late Ed Hoch, the best and certainly the most prolific generator of impossible crime stories since John Dickson Carr. In his nifty memoir about Hoch, Douglas Greene tells us that over the course of his lifetime Hoch produced at least 960 stories. Was each one a superior production? Not having read them all, we couldn’t say; but if they were good enough for shrewd editors, then you can be assured that even Hoch’s lesser efforts were better than most of his contemporaries.

   All But Impossible is Crippen & Landru’s penultimate collection of Ed Hoch’s series of tales about Dr. Sam Hawthorne, little Northmont’s general practitioner, “amateur” (his word) detective, and in Doug Greene’s view “Hoch’s finest creation.” Hoch seems to have reserved most of his best impossible crime plots for Dr. Sam to unravel: one kidnapping case, one accidental death that looks like foul play, and fourteen outright murders.

   Here’s a brief rundown: A baby that disappears right out from under everyone’s nose, including the mother’s … a murder in a locked room, with the only other person present innocent … a vanishment, with Dr. Sam an eyewitness … Sam spending the entire day with a man, being seen by others with him, but only Sam remembering him … a body found in a room that keeps disappearing—not the body, the room … a grandstanding swimmer dying in the pool—of poisoning … a man getting run over in the parking lot of a place that never existed … homicide by book—explosive literature at its worst … a fresh body in an old coffin (shades of JDC) … a man murdered in an open field by, to all appearances, a giant owl … a classic homicide in a locked house surrounded by pristine, undisturbed snow … another vanishment, this time with two observers … a disappearance involving the mayor, with Sam not fifty feet away … a murder solved, at least partly, by Alexander Graham Bell … and a dead body materializing inside a scarecrow in a public park in broad daylight.

   With the Sam Hawthorne stories Ed Hoch also put some effort into creating continuing characters and situations against a real world backdrop of developing history; Northmont is recovering from the Depression, but the first tremors of the approaching cataclysm in Europe are beginning to be felt in the little New England town. The stories in All But Impossible span the period from November 1936 to July 1940; in a few of them deteriorating world conditions serve to activate plot developments.

   If you like the Sam Hawthorne stories and have a complete collection of EQMMs running from August 1991 to June 1999, then you won’t need to get All But Impossible; and if you have a complete EQMM collection from December 1974 to May 2008, then you won’t need any of the C&L collections at all. If your situation is otherwise, though, you’re missing out on tales that, as Doug Greene says, are “wonderful in their ingenuity and superb storytelling.” And rumor hath it that a fifth and final collection of fifteen Dr. Sam Hawthorne adventures is already in the works.

      PREVIOUS COLLECTIONS —

Diagnosis: Impossible (1996) (12 stories)
More Things Impossible (2006) (15 stories)
Nothing Is Impossible (2013) (15 stories)   (reviewed here )