LILIAN JACKSON BRAUN – The Cat Who Went Underground. Jim Qwilleran #9. Putnam, hardcover, 1989. Jove, paperback, September 1989.
I like cats all right, and I’ve even discovered I can put up with them in detective stories. This is the first of the adventures of semi-retired Jim Qwilleran and his two Siamese pets (Koko and Yum Yum) I’ve read, and while I’m not sure I’m totally converted, it was amusing.
Braun’s style is a combination of breathless exclamation points with a rural folksiness of a northern Michigan sort that also manages not to be condescending. I do wish, however, that she’d allowed more than the last 40 pages for the detective work to take place.
To wit. While there are lots of hints concerning some sort of mysterious activity that is taking place, sometimes through the astrology columns in the newspaper, sometimes through a fortune-teller friend, Qwilleran does not find the body of the first known murder victim (under the floor of his cabin on the lake) until page 161.
Until then, what we’re given is a more-or-less hilarious account of the vicissitudes of a city man trying to cope with life in the “wild” — toilets that don’t flush, water heaters that don’t heat, coons in the chimney, and so on. (I guess I’ll probably stay where I am.)
— Reprinted and somewhat revised from Mystery*File #21, April 1990.
Bibliographic Notes: The first three books in Braun’s “Cat” series were published between 1966 and 1968. There was then a gap of 18 years before the fourth one came out, when the author was 75, and something strange happened. It became an overnight success and sold a ton of copies.
So successful that there were 25 more, with the last one, The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers, appearing in 2007, when Braun was 94. She died in 2011 at the grand old age of 98.
HARRY BROWN – The Stars in Their Courses. Knopf, hardcover, 1960; Bantam, paperback, 19??
EL DORADO. Paramount, 1967. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Charlene Holt, Arthur Hunnicutt, Ed Asner, Michele Carey, Christopher George and Olaf Wieghorst. Screenplay by Leigh Brackett, based on the novel The Stars in Their Courses, by Harry Brown. Directed by Howard Hawks.
The other day I re-read The Stars in Their Courses by Harry Brown, which I hadn’t touched in 30 years, and it spurred me to re-watch a film I haven’t seen in almost as long, El Dorado.
Stars tells the Trojan War legend reframed as a Western: Arch Eastmere (think Achilles) is a skillful gunfighter with a bad heart and worse luck, who returns to his home town to find that the small ranchers (to whom he owes money) are getting fed up with the local Big Rancher, Percy Randal. When Percy’s younger son rides off with the abused wife of one of the small ranchers, they’re ready to fight. Arch likes the Randals, and was a close friend of Percy’s tough older son Hallock (think Hector) but he owes a debt to the opposition….
It’s all a bit contrived and pretentious, but somehow fitting. The ancient heroes were to the Greeks as cowboys were to us when I was a kid, and it’s fascinating to see Brown set these leathery westerners to reenacting a legend, with splendid prose, fast action, and characters at once larger than life and all too human.
This was almost filmed by Howard Hawks as El Dorado — Hawks lost faith in the script half-way through and decided to just re-make Rio Bravo. If you watch Dorado you may notice the earlier scenes shot outdoors tend toward the grim side, but the later parts (done in the studio to save time & money) just earnestly copy Rio Bravo.
The wonder is that it all works so splendidly. Hawks’ gift for vivid action and his knack of making his actors look like they’re actually talking to each other were never displayed to better effect.
He’s helped considerably by a remarkable cast. Charlene Holt plays the local shady lady with a tender toughness that becomes really moving at times, and Michele Carey projects an untamed sexuality that smacks up agreeably against James Caan’s virile neophyte. Paul Fix and R.G. Armstrong lend their typecast western authority to the proceedings, and Christopher George recalls the amiable lethality of John Ireland in Red River, as a man who will share drink with someone or gun him down just as easily. Best of all, Arthur Hunnicutt positively shines as the Ultimate Comical Sidekick, a character so funny and bizarre that only he could do it justice.
And then there are the top-liners: John Wayne and Robert Mitchum playing the heroes of the piece with rueful maturity. Mitchum gets a showy part as the sheriff-turned-drunk, by turns comic and harrowing, and he makes it one of the best performances of a remarkable career. Wayne’s role as Mitchum’s gunfighter-buddy plagued by a debilitating wound is just as fine, his toughness crumbling with startling poignancy that somehow reveals the inner strength.
Hawks’ skill as a director has been duly celebrated in classics like To Have and Have Not, The Thing from Another World and Bringing Up Baby, but he was never better than in this broken-backed western.
By the way, El Dorado opens with the title credits over some fine Western paintings. They are the work of artist Olaf Wieghorst, who also plays the Swedish gunsmith with the great line, “He shoot the piano player, and they hang him.â€
Not all pulps listed on eBay sell. I’ve put together a list of those you can purchase from me directly, plus ones I’ve quoted to would-be buyers directly and not taken.
LAWMAN. United Artists, 1971. Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Lee J. Cobb, Robert Duvall, Sheree North, Albert Salmi, Richard Jordan, John McGiver, Ralph Waite. Director: Michael Winner.
Brutal and cynical, Lawman certainly isn’t a genial Western where the good guy takes on a villainous cattle baron, wins the love of a beautiful girl, and restores the equilibrium of the world to be on the side of justice. Rather, this Michael Winner film is a character study of an aging, brooding lawman so obsessively committed to his personal code of honor that all he is able to do is bring death and misery to all those he encounters.
Burt Lancaster, in a role that allows little for his personal charm to shine, portrays Jared Maddox. Sporting a black leather vest and a holster, Maddox rides into the town of Sabbath. We learn through a conversation that he has with the town’s marshal Cotton Ryan (Robert Ryan) that he has come to Sabbath for a very specific reason.
Several months ago, cowhands working for the stoical cattle baron Vincent Bronson (Lee J. Cobb) had ridden into a town by the name of Bannock and shot up the place. Although they were drunk and merely looking to blow off steam, an old man died at the hands of one of their bullets. And Maddox intends to bring the men back to Bannock to face trial.
This sets in motion a series of violent confrontations between Maddox and the wanted men, as well as anyone who dares stand in his way. Maddox is so tied to the cause of “justice†– indeed, to his very identity as a “lawman†– that he’s increasingly blind to how much unnecessary death and misery he is bringing in his refusal to budge even slightly from his personal code.
In that sense, Lawman stands in the tradition of those tragic Westerns in which a protagonist has outlived his time. Maddox belongs to an earlier era, in which the law was good and the outlaw was bad. Such binary demarcations are outdated in Braddock. Even the “bad†cattle baron seems to have more insight and compassion than Maddox.
But does this mean we are supposed to not root for Maddox? Or are we supposed to be somewhat detached spectators watching Maddox make one bad decision after another? Unlike Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) in Death Wish (1974), a film Winner directed several years after Lawman, we never get to see how or why Maddox was forged into a stone cold killer.
It’s the absence of a backstory that makes Lawman a far less compelling character study than it could have been. By the end of the film (SPOILER ALERT), when Maddox shoots a man in the back, we finally get the message. Maddox is as much a villain as a hero. And the real lawman in the film, the one we should admire is the quiet, thoughtful Cotton Ryan.
JILL McGOWN – Gone to Her Death. Lloyd & Hill #3. St. Martin’s Press, US, hardcover, 1990. Fawcett, US, paperback, 1991. First published in the UK as Death of a Dancer (Macmillan, hardcover, 1989).
If you didn’t know anything about England except for what you read in their mystery novels, you would have to conclude that there is only one thing on the minds of everyone who lives there, male or female, day or night, and that is S-E-X.
The scene is a public boys’ school, and even so, rape, attempted rape, voyeurism, impotence, nymphomania, repressed homosexuality, it’s all here. Even Inspector Lloyd is carrying on an affair with his sergeant, Judy Hill, and she’s still married. Spare me.
Afterthoughts: I think maybe I should add that McGown does have some sobering things to say about rape, and then secondly, underneath it all is really a pretty fair detective story. There is not a single sympathetic character in the whole book, but if you make it through to the end, you may find that the working out of the mystery is quite satisfactory.
— Reprinted and somewhat revised from Mystery*File #21, April 1990.
Bibliographic Note: There were 13 books in the Lloyd & Hill series, the last being Unlucky for Some (2004)
PORT OF MISSING GIRLS. Monogram Pictures, 1938. Harry Carey, Judith Allen, Milburn Stone, Betty Compson, Matty Fain, George Cleveland. Director: Karl Brown.
The nominal star of this minimally interesting movie is Harry Carey, but to my mind why is he still using silent film techniques — dramatic gestures, grotesque grimaces and so on — in 1938? To my mind, Milburn Stone is by far the more natural actor.
As Della Mason (!!), a night club singer on the lam, accused of killing the manager of the joint where she’s the star attraction, Judith Allen is very pretty, but when the movie was over I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup of other young starlets at the time.
She ends up on the cargo ship owned by Captain Storm (Carey), and on which Milburn Stone’s character is the radio operator. The kicker is that Storm, due to circumstances in his life, soon revealed, hates women. Stone, on the other hand, is most definitely attracted.
Forced to leave the runaway singer on land, they find what other reviewers call a brothel. The code has toned the place down a lot. It looks like no brothel I was ever in ever saw depicted on the screen. A dull, bare walls sort of tourist attraction, it’s more a place for couples to stop in on a lark and see where poor women whose lives have fallen in on them are forced to live, or in Della’s case, are singing.
There is a lot of plot shoved into this hour plus (but just a very small plus) movie. You will be happy to know that it all works out in the end.
A cast of characters! How wonderful it is to have a book contain a cast of characters!
Who, at some point, hasn’t had an experience similar to Maggie being tired, hungry and desperate for a shower. Hornsby conveys the feeling perfectly. However, few of us are so lucky as to be in Paris at the time. It is clear this is not going to be a romantic look at Paris as the mystery and suspense kick off immediately.
Never read a book set in France when hungry. Even the most simple of meals sounds delectable— “French ham and cheese in a length of baguette with tomato and fresh basil†—and if one has been to France, one knows Hornsby has perfectly captured the French view of Americans— “With a broad American smile, the sort that makes the more restrained French think we might be half wits…†and yet are not put off by us. There are a number of French, and some Italian, phrases used, but even when they are not translated, their meaning is easy to understand through the context.
There are a number of fascinating topics interwoven into the story, and the author has clearly done her research. The threat and capabilities of cyber-stalkers is eye-opening. There are a lot of coincidences in the story but, for the most part, they work. It is wonderfully convenient having two protagonists who are so well connected, but it does make sense considering the professions of characters, and it stays true to them.
There is humor sprinkled throughout. It’s subtle, but it’s there— “Is that blood, sir?†“It is,†he said. “Whether it’s mine or my colleague’s, I can’t say.†“Have you law enforcement or justice department credentials?†“I have a national health card and a membership card for an American store called COSTCO,†he said. “Which I would be happy to lend you if you should want to buy a new television or a gross of frozen buffalo wings.†Although there are hints, the motive and villain are rather a surprise.
Number 7, Rue Jacob provides danger, food, a hidden door, a bit of romance, and a very satisfying ending.
1. Telling Lies (1992)
2. Midnight Baby (1993)
3. Bad Intent (1994)
4. 77th Street Requiem (1995)
5. A Hard Light (1997)
6. In the Guise of Mercy (2009)
7. The Paramour’s Daughter (2010)
8. The Hanging (2012)
9. The Color of Light (2014)
10. Disturbing the Dark (2016)
11. Number 7, Rue Jacob (2018)
Lorraine Feather, the daughter of noted jazz critic Leonard Feather, is a singer-songwriter noted for her clever lyrics and convoluted wordplay in her music. “I know the Way to Brooklyn” is from her 2005 CD Dooji Wooji.
LAWRENCE BLOCK – The Topless Tulip Caper. Chip Harrison #4. Signet, paperback, 1998. Previously published as by Chip Harrison: Gold Medal P3274, paperback original, 1975.
No Score (1970) and Chip Harrison Scores Again (1971), the first two books in Lawrence Block’s “Chip Harrison” series, all first published as by Chip Harrison, were largely sex farces with marginal criminous elements. In the first one, at least, a young lad named Chip Harrison who has never had sex does his best to change that situation.
In the next two books, Make Out with Murder (1974) and this one, Chip has teamed up à la Archie Goodwin with a Nero Wolfe wanna-be detective named Leo Haig. The emphasis is on the detective work, but as Chip explains as he goes along, his editor at Gold Medal wants plenty of sex scenes too. Sex sells, he is told.
The book is divided into three parts. Part one begins with Chip at a strip tease club where Haig’s latest client, Tulip Willing (not her real name), is working as a dancer. Well, strip tease is a misnomer as the dancers come out onto the stage totally nude to begin with, so there is no actual stripping involved.
Chip describes the scene so well that I think any male reader may well wish he was there. Block is at his comedic best in part one, with a smile on every page, if not an out and out loud guffaw. What Haig has been hired to do by his client, an out and out knockout of feminine pulchritude, is to find out who killed her tank full of tropical fish.
This has intrigued Haig because his particular obsession is not growing orchids but breeding tropical fish himself. But it is Tulip’s roommate, also a dancer (named Cherry Bounce) who is killed by curare (an unseen dart?) right as her act is coming to a close (while totally nude).
Part two consists of Chip Harrison doing his Archie Goodwin routine, questioning suspects and so on, dallying once or twice in detail that Archie never ever got into.
In part three Leo Haig takes over, playing Nero Wolfe to the hilt in front of a room full of all of the suspects as well as two grumpy representatives of the police department. I don’t think Lawrence Block does it as well as Rex Stout, but in its own way, part three works out in quite satisfactory fashion.
I don’t know how you feel about reading a Nero Wolfe book with sex scenes in it, but Block is never a bad writer, and that is what this is. I’ll have to leave that particular question for you to decide for yourself. Speaking of sex scenes, one interesting aspect to the book is the ending in which Haig twits Chip a bit for being an unreliable narrator. Regarding their client, for example, did he or didn’t he?
