THE GANGSTER CHRONICLES. NBC, 13 episode mini-series. Episode 1. “An American Story.” Michael Nouri (Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano), Joe Penny (Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel), Brian Benben, Kathleen Lloyd, Madeleine Stowe, Chad Redding, Markie Post. Director: Richard C. Sarafian.
Ten minutes after turning this on I found myself asking “Why am I watching this?” I couldn’t come up with any kind of answer, so I turned it off.
Tonight’s show was both enhanced and handicapped by flashbacks to Pearl Harbor Day. (I assume you know that the show takes place in Hawaii.) Magnum’s client ts a judge who’s been nominated to the US Supreme Court, but he was once married to a Honolulu hooker, and he’s afraid of blackmail. He hires Magnum to find her.
And without the advantages of instant replay, I still don’t know how Magnum spotted the killer — the only person to know that both parties in their ill-fated romance were still alive. How’d he know. (Either one of them.)
The regular characters are solidly done. I especially like John Hillerman as Higgins, whose self-appointed job it is to keep Magnum in line. (Hillerma it also was, of course, who played the irrepressible Simon Brimmer in TV’s most recent version of Ellery Queen.)
This is getting too long. I just wanted to add that I had a crush on June Lockhart, back 25 years ago when she played Jon Provost’s mommy on Lassie. My, but aren’t men fickle. Ah, Miss Lockhart, but don’t you have a lovely daughter!
MIKE PHILLIPS – Point of Darkness. Samson Dean #3. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1995. First published in the UK by Michael Joseph, hardcover, 1994. No US paperback edition.
Phillips is new to me, though obviously not to everyone. The two previous tales about Sam Dean, a reporter of Anglo-Caribbean descent, have been set in London — Blood Rights and The Late Candidate. This, the first since 1991, takes place in New York City. Phillips also write the novelization of for the movie Boyz in the Hood.
Sammy Dean is in the Big Apple to try to find the straying daughter of a boyhood friend dying in London. He’s no stranger to the city abd its Caribbean neighborhoods — Jamaica, Queens, the Bronx — but an outsider nevertheless, The girl had disappeared after working as a domestic for the aging parents of a high City official, and more people than Dean are looking for her — for reasons he doesn’t know. What seemed to be an uncomplicated if tedious and difficul task turns nasty, and he soon finds both himself and the object of his search in serious danger.
This is blurbed as being “on the tradition of Walter Mosley.” Me, I’d have thought that Mosley was a few books shy of a “tradition” — but hey, whatever works. Phillips is a lot closer in tone ro Mosley than to Chester Himes or Barbara Neely, if that counts. Traditional or not, I liked it. Phillips seems to know his territory, and tells his story in first-person in an undramatic, semi-reflective way that I found appealing.
The urban black/Caribbean world was new to me, and I thought he did an excellent job of painting its picture without slowing down the story. As I’ve said before, it would be foolish of me or any white man to try to judge the realism of black characters, but they seemed like real people to me, and believable and sympathetic ones. Phillips is a good writer with a different viewpoint.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #18, February-March 1995.
Bio-Bibliographic Notes: One online source describes the author as having been “… born in Georgetown, Guyana. He came to Britain as a child and grew up in London. He was educated at the University of London and the University of Essex, and gained a Postgraduate Certificate of Education at Goldsmiths College, London.” Another source calls Sam Dean a “Jamaican-born, London-bred, street-smart, sexy, self-effacing, tough, and likeable black journalist.”
There was but one more book in the series, that being An Image to Die For (1995).
Peplum par excellence. An Italian production with Andre De Toth credited as its director (there’s some dispute as to how much actual work he did on the film), Gold for the Caesars isn’t exactly the type of film that is rich in character development. Instead, it relies upon costumes, sword fights, and campiness to get its point across. And that point is celluloid escapism, pure and simple.
Jeffrey Hunter, a long way from the set of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), portrays Lacer, a slave in the hands of Rome. He’s also an architect, responsible for aiding in the construction of a bridge in Spain. Enlisted by a local Roman leader to aid in the search for gold in hill country occupied by the Celts, he is forced to choose between a life of enslavement versus a chance to risk it all for freedom. Along the way, he falls for a Roman slave girl.
That’s about it, to be honest. That’s the essence of the plot. But you know what? In an era of overwrought CGI productions, there’s something slightly charming about being able to watch an admittedly mediocre sword-and-sandal film that actually has a large cast of extras portraying soldiers and slaves alike.
Make no mistake about it: if this movie was remade today – a highly dubious proposition to be sure – both the Roman and Celt warriors would likely be “made†of CGI imagery rather than a cast of hundreds all dressed in traditional costumes. And a lot of it would probably have been filmed on green screens rather than outside. I can’t overly recommend anyone going out of his way to see Gold for the Caesars, but I’m not going to be unduly harsh on it either.
JOHN CHRISTOPHER – The Little People. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1967. Simon & Schuster, US, hardcover, 1967. Avon V2243, US, paperback, August 1968. Serialized in three parts in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January through March 1967.
The house lay at the heart of the wilderness. Small creatures moved in the lawns and gardens, fish cruised in the lake. In the house itself, mice came out from holes and wainscots and fed on crumbs, vaguely aware that things were easier, now the cats and the rats had gone. For the rats had gone indeed. They had come to this place a millenium and a half ago, with the first men who settled here. For fifteen centuries, man had waged war on them, and the rats had survived. They had survived the periods of man’s absence, too. Now they were gone, killed not by starvation, or poisons, or traps, but by a new, strange, subtle and deadly weapon, wielded by creatures who still did not know the nature or the extent of their powers; but who were learning. The cats, who had been their hunters, died with them. The mice lived on, undisturbed, because they posed no threat to the new masters.
In their bedrooms, men and women slept, and dreamt their ordinary dreams. Elsewhere in the house, figures, human in form though not in stature, moved silently and quickly. Sometimes they talked to each other, mouthing a guttural tongue in high liquid voices, but speech was a habit, not a necessity. They had long known what it was to share each other’s thoughts, but now they were aware of other minds, of territories open, and vulnerable. This was not like the rats or the cats had been : they had no sense of danger. More from curiosity and interest than malice, they made their forays, conducted their manipulations.
Conveniently John Christopher introduces the title characters of his novel, The Little People, fairly late in the action just as the reader and a few of the cast of eight protagonists gathered at a holiday at Castle Kilabeg in Western Ireland on the Kilabeg bog discover the mystery they have uncovered is more sinister than it origins in Nazi pseudo-science. As is the usual way with Christopher, suspense is ratcheting up to a fever pitch, along with terror, as the something awful at the heart of the action works into the light.
Christopher was one of the leading exponents of a particularly British type of science fiction I think of as British Gothic SF, a genre that begins with H. G. Wells and finds its modern voice in John Wyndham, and which was practiced by writers as diverse as John Creasey, John Blackburn, Christopher Priest, Nigel Kneale, Charles Eric Maine, Christopher Hodder-Williams, Philip McCutchan, L. P. Davies, and at times even John Buchan, Victor Canning, and Geoffrey Household.
Chief among its attributes are usually a modern often bucolic setting, flawed modern protagonists pitted against something beyond their understanding or ability to combat, and a sense that some things may never be fully explained or understood.
Christopher (Sam Youd), who also wrote straight suspense fiction (Scent of Poppies, Caves of Night), historical novels (Sarnia), but made his name with No Blade of Grass (aka The Death of Grass), The Possessed, Pendulum, The Long Winter, and The Ragged Edge (Christopher once remarked in an interview about the number of civilizations he had destroyed) and went on to write the classic juvenile Tripods series, falls somewhere between John Wyndham and J. G. Ballard (I’ve seen it suggested Ballard had read Christopher) in voice and ranks high in his ability to generate real suspense and quiet terror while drawing believable human beings thrown into irrational confrontations. His best books usually feature a group of people in isolation placed under incredible tension as in The White Voyage and A Cloud of Silver.
Here a group of people, a German businessman, son of a Nazi war criminal and his half Jewish wife; a British couple who hate each other and their sexually precocious teen age daughter; the owner of Castle Killabeg, an attractive young woman, who recently inherited it, her London-based solicitor boyfriend and his solicitor pal from Dublin; gather on holiday in sharply drawn portraits replete with flaws and discover there is something going on at the Castle. When one of them sees a perfectly formed human being only a foot tall dressed in green, it seems like an Irish fairy tale come true, but all too soon it becomes clear this is not the wee fairy folk of legend.
Soon enough they discover these small people are substantially real and make contact. They learn that they are the result of Nazi medical experiments to retard human growth and that they and the Nazi who created them were smuggled into neutral Ireland at the end of the war by the owner’s recently passed uncle.
Horrible enough, but there is more, especially when the housekeeper who has shown a morbid fear of them is found dead at the bottom of the cellar stairs, and what happened to the rats that inhabit any Irish castle worthy of the name?
From that point on, the terror ratchets up exponentially as the “little people†play on the fears and weaknesses of the humans in the castle, all building to a night of terror in which humans face their darkest nature and greatest fear manipulated by the little people made monsters by their creator and masters.
Some of you may recall the Avon paperback edition of this novel with a garish cover that makes it look like Ilsa the SS She-Wolf meets whip and Swastika bearing Leprechauns. Glorious as that piece of pulp art might have been it did ill service to a fine suspense novel that deals with something far more serious than pulp exploitation. The Little People is not only a fine read, it has something to say about what makes us human and what makes monsters into monsters, human and inhuman.
THREE HOURS TO KILL. Columbia, 1954. Dana Andrews, Donna Reed, Dianne Foster, Stephen Elliott, Laurence Hugo, Carolyn Jones, and Whit Bissell. Screenplay by Richard Alan Simmons, Roy Huggins, and Maxwell Shane, from a story by Alex Gottlieb. Directed by Alfred L. Werker.
As medium-budget Westerns go, this is one of the best. With a writing team that includes Roy Huggins and Maxwell Shane, one expects something mystery-related, and they deliver nicely here, under the able direction of Alfred Werker.
Werker is best known to mystery fans for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Fox, 1939) but in the 1950s he turned out a series of well-tuned westerns that included Devil’s Canyon, The Last Posse, and Rebel in Town, a film with violence still shocking today.
Getting back to Three/Kill though, it’s structured as a revenge tale (another theme common to the genre) as Dana Andrews, looking very much like a declining star, rides back into the town where he was lynched three years ago, looking for the owl-hoot (sigh) who framed him for murder.
What he finds is a town full of folks who’d rather forget all about him, including Donna Reed, who bore his child and is now respectably married to Richard Coogan (TV’s original Captain Video), Bartender James Westerfield, Sheriff Stephen Elliott (who played Cap Vid’s arch-enemy, Dr Pauli) gambler Laurence Hugo, and the ubiquitous Whit Bissel — all of them excellet in meaty parts..
The film itself was produced by Harry Joe Brown, who did the Budd Boetticher / Randolph Scott westerns, and he filled this one with color, action, and a cast of familiar faces from the B-Westerns, including Francis McDonald, Snub Pollard, Buddy Roosevelt and Sid Saylor.
There’s an unusual slant to this film, with Andrews the center of attention who finds himself now oddly irrelevant as he pursues his lonely justice. Rather than letting things get bogged down in talk though, Director Werker keeps the action coming, photographed in splendid b-movie Technicolor with the requisite horse-chases, fist-fights and shoot-outs one expects.
What one doesn’t expect is the surprisingly thoughtful conclusion, which I won’t reveal here except to say that it lingers in the memory long after a lot of better-known westerns have bit the cranial dust.
FRANK GRUBER “The Sad Serbian.” Short story. Sam Cragg #1. First published in Black Mask, March 1939. Reprinted as “1000-to-1 for Your Money,” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1950. Also reprinted in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, edited by Otto Penzler (Vintage Crime, softcover, November 2007).
I’d say that a skip-tracer definitely falls into the same category as a private eye, wouldn’t you? This was Sam Cragg’s only solo adventure. The very next year found him teamed up with Johnny Fletcher in The French Key (Farrar, hardcover, 1940) in the first of 14 novels they appeared in together.
To tell to you the truth, though, I’m not at all sure the Sam Cragg in this story is the same Sam Cragg who teamed up with Johnny Fletcher in all those books. In this one he tells the story himself, and he’s both observant and articulate, while the Sam Cragg in the Fletcher books is little more than a second banana or even a musclebound stooge, if you will. Fletcher is the brains of the pair, Cragg is the brawn.
And here’s another “to tell you the truth.” While always having an old pupwriter’s gift for words, Frank Gruber’s choice of stories to tell and I are often not entirely on the same wavelength, and “The Sad Serbian” is no exception. It has something to to with a Serbian prince and a scam of some kind he’s pulling on Chicago’s Serbian community, somehow in conjunction (or competition) with a giant 300-pound Amazon of a woman.
The story’s both too complicated and worse, uninteresting, to me at least, a deadly combination in a story if ever there was one. One saving grace, though, is the interplay between Cragg and Betty, the secretary of the outfit he works for. There should have been more of it. Maybe in a followup story of Sam on his own there would have been.
[ADDED LATER.] My review of The Limping Goose (Rinehart, hardcover,1954), including a list of all 14 Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg books can be found here.
FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins
My presentation on Cornell Woolrich at Columbia late in March went over, I think, quite well, but I’m the least objective judge in the world when it comes to my own material. For about six weeks it was accessible on the Web and YouTube so every reader of this column could check it out if they wished. But as I put the finishing touches to this column I discovered that apparently it has been removed. Drat!
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In the middle of my presentation there was a special guest appearance (in voice only) from none other than Basil Rathbone, now dead more than half a century. I incorporated this sound bite from the grave because Roy William Neill, who directed the Woolrich-based movie BLACK ANGEL (1946), is best known for having directed most of Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series (1941-46) starring Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.
In an appearance before a Holmes group in New York in 1965, two years before his death, Rathbone talked about Neill’s sudden death at age 59, soon after completing BLACK ANGEL. You can’t listen to it on your computer any more, but you’ll find a transcript of the relevant parts in my March column and also on pages 463-464 of my FIRST YOU DREAM, THEN YOU DIE. Thirty-odd years ago, when I first transcribed the recording for FIRST YOU DREAM, I took Rathbone to say that Neill was known among the Holmes crew as Muggsy, but listening several more times I realized it should have been Mousie and changed it in my column.
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I was not present at Rathbone’s New York talk but I had heard him live about a year earlier, when I was a senior in undergraduate school and he gave a talk at a girls’ college in New Jersey. He had lost much of his hair but was still as imperially slim and commanding and his voice as hypnotically powerful as we all remember him and it from his Holmes years.
About ten years ago, sifting through some stuff I had written in college, I learned that during that same senior year I had also heard — well, you’ll soon find out. Anyone remember THE DEPUTY? No, it wasn’t a Western but an extremely controversial drama by Rolf Hochhuth, dealing with Pope Pius XII, the Nazis and the Holocaust. The play was staged in every major European country and came to the United States in 1963. I saw the New York version — which, as almost everyone agreed, was a preposterous travesty of what Hochhuth had written — and wrote an article about it for my college newspaper.
I hadn’t given the matter a thought for generations until about ten years ago when I found and reread a copy of the article in that box of college writings and discovered to my stupefaction and delight that the part of the heroic young Jesuit who defied the pope and went to Auschwitz to share the fate of the Jews was played by a then little-known actor by the name of Jeremy Brett. That’s right: during the same academic year I had heard and seen the Holmes of my generation and the Holmes of the next.
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Hochhuth was born in Germany in 1931, the year before a young Englishman named John Creasey published the first of what were to be more than 500 novels under his own name and at least fifteen pseudonyms. He created the byline of Gordon Ashe and a character named Patrick Dawlish back in the late Thirties. After finishing another novel in three days, he wrote less than a year before his death, “I plunged into a Bulldog Drummond type of book.â€
He quickly discovered that Dawlish simply “would not behave like Bulldog Drummond†but, despite this surprise, completed that book, published in England as THE SPEAKER (John Long, 1939), in three and a half days. A few years after the end of World War II, Creasey traveled to the U.S. on a mission to find out why virtually none of his more than two hundred novels had been accepted by American publishers.
Joan Kahn, the iconic mystery editor at Harper, read some of his English books and faulted them for having protagonists readers couldn’t identify with and for lacking the emotional element that the American public demanded. Creasey listened to her and within a few years was established as a Harper author. In later years he prided himself on his stylistic evolution. “My books are read emotionally….I write subjectively, to the heart.â€
His Gordon Ashe byline and the Patrick Dawlish novels remained unknown in the States except for one, first published in England as THE LONG SEARCH (John Long, 1953), which came out here as a paperback original from Ace Books and garnered zero attention, not even a review in the NEW YORK TIMES by Anthony Boucher, who covered most softcover mysteries as a matter of course. DROP DEAD! (Ace pb #D-71, 1954) is light on plot but demonstrates beautifully what Creasey learned from Joan Kahn.
Dawlish comes to Arizona looking for his wife Felicity, who was on a solo trip to the States when she vanished near the Grand Canyon just after her guide jumped or fell or was pushed to his death. A few hours after his arrival at the Canyon he finds himself followed. The next morning two men stop him near the spot when the guide went over the canyon rim and threaten to throw him over too unless he tells them why he came to Arizona. He saves himself by dropping over the edge of the canyon onto a rock ledge twenty feet below.
This is the first of a huge number of tight spots he walks into and gets out of in his frantic search for his wife. The trail takes him from Arizona to an isolated Nevada cattle ranch, then to Las Vegas and the California desert near Death Valley before he finally gets the answers, which aren’t terribly interesting. Essentially this isn’t a mystery but a traditional Western novel updated to the early Fifties, complete with convertibles, fire engines and a helicopter.
The local color is vivid and seems to ring true, suggesting that Creasey had spent some time in the West, as witness also the following year’s Dawlish novel, DEATH IN THE TREES (John Long, 1954), which is set in Washington State. Occasionally, as when cabins are referred to as huts or shacks and a Vegas casino as a gaming saloon, the narrative betrays Creasey’s English origins.
But despite the moment when a bad guy tells Dawlish that someone has “put the black†on him (which in gringo lingo means he’s being blackmailed), by and large Creasey is head and shoulders above most English writers when it comes to keeping his American characters from talking like Brits. Although Dawlish sounds English as he should, in some respects he reminds me of the protagonist of an American noir novel, often in mortal danger and suffering like Job. Here are four examples in fewer than fifteen pages.
Pain stabbed through [his legs], but not so badly as it had done through his arms. (106)
As he asked [whether his wife is dead] it seemed as if steel bands were fastening round him, and even breathing was difficult…. (114)
It was almost dark when they landed, and the bump on landing jolted Dawlish’s head into screaming agony. (119)
…[H]is eyes [were] glassy and his cheeks livid with the pain. (119)
Whether lines like these are also in the earlier English version THE LONG SEARCH remains unknown, but its U.S. counterpart makes it clear that one of the lessons Creasey had learned from Joan Kahn, perhaps too well, was to make his heroes vulnerable. His Scotland Yard sleuth Inspector Roger West exhibits the same kind of vulnerability in novels of the same period like THE BLIND SPOT (Harper, 1954).
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Some Web sources claim that the first Dawlish novel was DEATH ON DEMAND (John Long, 1939), but Creasey himself — and who should know better? — identified his character’s debut book as THE SPEAKER, published earlier the same year. It’s interesting to compare the later Dawlish with his first appearance, which Creasey revised shortly before his death, although he missed a few gaffes, leaving intact the plural noun “sneak-thiefs†(2) and the singular noun “collaboration†where he clearly meant “corroboration†(20).
The much younger Dawlish, who’s described as “a blond Atlas…with a reputation at sport and big game†(10), and his three buddies, who are clearly modeled on the boon companions of Bulldog Drummond or the early Simon Templar, are pitted against an Edgar Wallace-style hidden mastermind originally known as the Speaker but in this revision by the more sinister name of THE CROAKER (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973).
In the U.S. version it’s the Croaker’s second-in-command who’s known as the Speaker, which leads me to wonder: If the boss toad was originally called the Speaker, what was the secondary toad’s moniker? Or could the 1939 version have been named for Number Two? Creasey offers full measure of action, punctuated with abundant exclamation points and italicized words as if the book were a novelization of the BATMAN TV series of a few years earlier. As usual in his pre-WWII novels, the hero and everyone else keep stiff upper lips and show zero vulnerability. It’s hard to believe that this Dawlish and the Dawlish of DROP DEAD! were meant to be the same character.
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For this column I can’t claim the virtue of unity, but I hope there have been compensations. Woolrich, Rathbone, Pius XII, plus Creasey and a Croaker and a Speaker — whatta cast!
LESTER del REY, Editor – Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Second Annual Edition. E. P. Dutton, hardcover. 1973. Ace, paperback, December 1975.
#11. PHYLLIS MACLELLAN “Thus Love Betrays Us.” Short story. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1972. Reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 20th Series, edited by Edward L. Ferman (Doubleday, hardcover, 1973).
I have been remiss. It’s been over a month since I reviewed the previous story in this anthology. At this rate, when I’m done, an event that is still four stories off, neither you not I (and especially I) will have any way to look back and put the book into any kind of overall perspective.
But even so, “Thus Love Betrays Us” is a good one, and is well worth being chosen for this Best of the Year anthology. When biologist Alex Barthold is dropped off by an exploratory ship on the planet Deirdre to learn what he can about it as a one man expedition, what he does not know is that the ship will never return. Until superiors realize that something has gone wrong, he will be as alone as he can be.
This on a planet on which there is no day or night, only an ever present gloom on a place in which the only plant life is various forms of moss. He sends reports out, but replies never come back. He’s all alone on a world that seems to close in on him more and more every day.
Until, that is, he comes across a strange truly alien being whose life he happens to save. They become friends, he thinks, but aliens are aliens, and friendship may or may not be friendship in the sense that Barthold assumes to be reciprocal. This, in the end, is the point of the story, most literately told. No Planet Stories tale, this.
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Previously from the del Rey anthology: C. N. GLOECKNER “Miscount.”
DEATH SHIP. AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1980. George Kennedy, Richard Crenna, Nick Mancuso, Sally Ann Howes, Kate Reid. Director: Alvin Rakoff. [Watched on HBO.]
I’m not too sure why I watched this. It’s not the sort of thing I am usually interested in at all. Maybe it’s because I like to warch George Kennedy in action as an actor.
He’s in top form in this one. He plays a cruise ship capyain on his last voyage before being forcibly retired. He doesn’t get on at all well with either passengers or crew.
But then the cruise liner is attacked and sunk by a huge hulk of a ship running circular patterns in the Atlantic totally unmanned — this is the “death ship.” Kennedy, plus his soon-to-be replacement (Richard Crenna) and a few others, including Crenna’s wife and two young children, are rescued, is that’s the word, by the killer ship.
The movie is scary, all right, but it helps that the new passengers are dumber than you can possibly imagine. Even after two of the party have been killed off, in fairly gruesome fashion, they allow themselves to become separated and even easier prey.
Eventually they discover that the boat had been a Nazi (of course) interrogation ship, and it is full of torture rooms, corpses, some complete, some not; only pieces of bodies, and lots and lots of cobwebs.
Kennedy makes a fine Nazi. Why the ship turns against him and allows Crenna and his family to escape is not explained. For that matter, nothing is explained.
Rated R, and if you don’t know why, you haven’t been paying attention. There is some nudity as well, but if you were to watch this movie and found it sexually stimulating, I would really prefer not to know you.
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Coming up on HBO this month are some more of the same: Humanoids from the Deep, The Legacy, Thirst(about vampires) andSilent Scream. I don’t plan on watching any of them [Nor did I.]
