As some of you may know, I have been selling books on Amazon for as long as third party sellers have been allowed to do so there. Sales are decent there for recent books. Unfortunately, older books do not do nearly as well there. I have several thousand older mystery and western hardcovers that I would like to find new homes for, and to that end, I’ve just posted a first list of them online.

   To facilitate moving them out, I hope, I’ve priced them at half of what I believe is are “current market values,” as determined by doing some comparison shopping at abebooks.com.

   Some are extremely scarce and are priced accordingly, but many of them are $5.00 each, which is less than many new paperbacks at Barnes & Noble.

   Here’s the link to my first online list, with many more to come:

      https://mysteryfile.com/Books/VHC

   I hope you’ll take a look!

  EDWARD D. HOCH “The Spy Who Came to the Brink.” Short story. Jeffrey Rand #3. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1965. Collected in The Spy and the Thief (Davis, digest-sized paperback; 1st printing, December 1971 (Ellery Queen Presents #3.)

   As you might easily deduce from the title, the 1971 collection of tales reprinted from EQMM is evenly split between those of Jeffrey Rand (7) and those with master thief Nick Velvet (also 7). I’ve always liked the Velvet stories more, but the ones with Rand are also extremely good.

   Rand is head of Britain’s Department of Concealed Communications — a spy agency, that is to say, one dealings primarily, but entirely, with codes and ciphers. It’s a job that keeps him busy, with dozens of his adventures to have been told, many of which have taken him around the world several times over.

   In “The Spy Who Came to the Brink,” Rand must puzzle out why a small time TV actor who has gone to great length to steal a secret diplomatic code is shot to death on orders from Russia before he could do so.

   It isn’t that he knew too much, as Rand finally concludes, but rather that he knew too little. Hoch had a devious mind as a writer, second to none, and how he managed to tell short stories as short as this one (ten pages) and still include a strong amount of actual detective work in them, is a absolute mystery to me.

GRAHAM GREENE – The Third Man. Novella. Viking Press, US, hardcover, 1950. First published in the UK; included in The Third Man and The Fallen Idol (Heinemann 1950). Novelization of the screenplay.

THE THIRD MAN. British Lion Films, 1949. Joseph Cotten, Valli, Orson Welles, (Harry Lime), Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee. Director: Director: Carol Reed.

   Carol Reed’s film of THE THIRD MAN surfaced on my to-be-watched-again pile, so I decided to do a thorough job of it, and re-read Graham Greene’s novel (written at the same time as his screenplay) and Charles Drazin’s study of the film, IN SEARCH OF THE THIRD MAN (Limelight, 2000).

   Drazin’s book recounts the events in 1948-9 surrounding the making and marketing of THE THIRD MAN, and it reads like a novel, with director Carol Reed as the hero, writer Graham Greene as his weak-willed sidekick, producers David O. Selznick and Alexander Korda as comic relief, and Orson Welles as the villain of the piece.

   Reading this, one is surprised at how much of the film was simply a mater of convenience: Selznick, the prestigious producer of GONE WITH THE WIND, had money tied up in England that had to be spent there, so — with appropriate flourishes and ballyhoo — he formed a partnership with England’s Alexander Korda, a filmmaker of approximately equal splendour, who had money tied up in central Europe and needed a hit.

   Korda had known some success with Carol Reed and Graham Greene (FALLEN IDOL, 1948) and prevailed upon Reed to write a screenplay set in contemporary Vienna so he could spend his money there. For his part, Graham Greene had a story idea sitting around — something about a man probing the murder of a friend and getting some nasty surprises — and he saw a trip to Vienna as an excellent opportunity to cheat on his wife, so he was only too happy to accept the assignment.

   While Greene was in Vienna learning about sewers and Ferris wheels, Korda and Selznick spoke often and loudly to the press about their forthcoming masterpiece, hinting at a cast that might include Cary Grant as Harry Lime, Jimmy Stewart as his duped friend, and Ingrid Bergman as the woman they loved. Or Jennifer Jones. Or Ralph Richardson. What Selznick ended up putting out was two contract players he was paying anyway, Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli, while Korda financed the logistics by selling rights to release his old pictures in post-war Europe, found Orson Welles in need of money for OTHELLO, and signed him up — whereupon Welles proceeded to behave as obstreperously as possible (according to Drazin) showing up weeks late in Vienna, then refusing to act in the sewers, or much of anyplace else, really, requiring extensive use of a double on almost all the location shooting.

   So what you had here was a much-heralded mega-film made on hand-shakes, promises and pretense, and the wonder is that it turned out so damgood. Greene’s script is sharp, suspenseful and cleverly turned, the performances are real and moving — particularly Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee as a couple of weary MPs — and there’s a fascinating visual tension between Carol Reed’s carefully-composed images and the riotous look of a city that has been “bombed about a bit.”

   Characters go about dressed in elegant scraps of ill-fitting apparel, walking past palaces and rubble, and the dichotomy extends even to the memorable scene on the Ferris wheel, where Orson Welles speaks of death, taxes and heartburn while Joseph Cotten prepares himself to sell out or get sold.

   As for the book itself, it was planned by Korda and Selznick to be marketed in conjunction with the film for added publicity, and they thought that a rather neat trick in those early days before merchandising and product placement. And again, the wonder is that a book written as a matter of convenience should turn out so readable. Greene’s prose is crisp, witty, and not a bit rushed, and though the crux of the story is in no way original, he handles it well enough to make it seem fresh.

   I should note there’s an important difference between the ending of the book and the movie. Without giving it away, I may say Korda and Selznick thought the heroine’s action unrealistic for a woman who had been through what she had. They were wrong. As I read THE THIRD MAN I was impressed by the recurring theme of characters who have survived a war trying to put their lives back together, and Greene’s ending seemed to me a rather touching tribute to the resilience of the human spirit. And heart.

THIS ISLAND EARTH. Universal International, 1955. Jeff Morrow, Faith Domergue, Rex Reason, Lance Fuller, Robert Nichols. Based on the book by Raymond F. Jones (Shasta, hardcover, 1952), a fixup novel comprised of stories appearing in three separate issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1949-50. Director: Joseph M. Newman.

   There is an old saying that you can’t go home again, and I know it’s true, as this movie proves. When I saw this movie the first time, I was 13 years old, and I thought it was the best science fiction movie I’d ever seen. It was in color, first of all, and all of the gadgets in the movie simply knocked my socks off.

   Forbidden Planet came along the very next year, but while that one was also in color and had Robby the Robot and even better special effects, I still liked This Island Earth better. Why? Two scenes have stood out over all these past 60 years. The two scientists building a communications device called the interlocutor from scratch using blueprints and parts send by mail from an anonymous source.

   I tried doing the same thing in my basement at home, but some of the parts must have gotten lost in the mail.

   The other scene I remember is Jeff Morrow and Faith Domergue standing in clear vertical tubes designed as either compression or decompression devices so as to condition them for either space travel or life on the aliens’ planet on their way to the latter to save their civilization. I’ve always been a little vague about the details, but details don’t matter, when you see the two Earthlings in skeletal form as the tubes do what ever is is they did.

   What I didn’t remember — and how could I forget? — is the weird ugly mutated monster that threatens the pair as they make their way back to Earth having failed their mission. A convenient form of amnesia, I guess.

   Nor do I remember when I was 13 wondering why it was the aliens who had so much power and could do many wondrous things on Earth needed all those scientists from Earth to help them fight their battles with other aliens back home.

   I don’t think that Faith Domergue impersonated a atomic scientist very well, but she certainly wore her tight fitting space uniform quite nicely, long before Racquel Welch did in Fantastic Voyage. This Island Earth was there first in a number of ways, but once the group of four left the planet Earth for Metaluna, the story seems to lose its way. Some nice memories were lost along the way as well. I was disappointed.

PAUL AYRES – Dead Heat. Bell, hardcover, 1950. No paperback edition.

   I am always very hesitant in saying that any book is the first and/or only one in a particular category, but off the top of my head, I don’t know of any other mystery novel that was based on a radio series, that being Casey Crime Photographer, which was of course based on the character created by George Harmon Coxe.

   I don’t know how this book happened to come about. Perhaps Randy Cox, our resident expert on all things Casey, will leave a comment to tell us more. As for the author, one supposedly Paul Ayres, he was in real life writer Edward S. Aarons, of Gold Medal’s “Assignment” series fame. In 1950, however, he’d written only one book under his own name; before then he was always Edward Ronns.

   You have to be of a certain age to have listened to the radio when the program was on the air. It ended in 1955 — after having started in 1943 — but since we did not have a local CBS outlet nearby when I was young, I never heard it until I started collecting OTR shows on tape in the mid-70s. Nonetheless, the book brought back quite a few memories from that later time and era:

   The characters were Casey, of course; his girl friend Ann Williams, who also worked for the Morning Express; and Captain Logan of Homicide. Every so often the action stops and they all find their way to the Blue Note cafe, where Ethelbert was the bartender and Herman played the piano.

   From the title and cover image above you might possibly guess that Dead Heat takes place in the world of horse racing, and it does, but it also takes place i the dead of summer, and the whole city of Boston is sweltering in the heat. Murdered is a jockey who has made a mess of his two currently overlapping love affairs, but who is also known for being scrupulously honest. This makes the timing of his death very suspicious: it’s before a race that if he were riding, he’d be a cinch to win.

   Aarons’ prose is clean and uncluttered, very descriptive, and since the plot is not all that complicated, the book takes no time at all to read. It probably isn’t as rewarding as one of Coxe’s own stories about Casey, but I enjoyed it immensely.

CHARLES O. LOCKE – The Hell Bent Kid. W. W. Norton, hardcover, 1958. Popular Library, paperback, 1958; reprinted. 1963. Ace, paperback, date unknown. Named at one time as one of the top 25 Western novels of all time by the Western Writers of America. Film: Released as From Hell to Texas (20th Century Fox, 1958) Don Murray, Diane Varsi, Chill Wills, R. G. Armstrong, Dennis Hopper. Directed by Henry Hathaway.

   Tot Lohman is only about eighteen, a fair hand with cattle, but gifted with his two loves, horses and guns. He’s a decent kid, hard luck, but hard luck isn’t unusual on the Staked Plains of West Texas, the Llano Estacado.

   But life has just spun out of control for Tot because he killed a Boyd, and the Boyd was related to Hunter Boyd, and his son wild Tom Boyd, and neither will stand for the killing.

   Tot wisely decides getting out of the country will be better than waiting for the Boyds. He heads for New Mexico looking for his father determined to put the Boyds behind him, but the Boyds are determined and want “justice,” and they will do anything to get it, including turning Tot Lohman, a big kid who just happens to be good with a gun into the Hell Bent Kid, a killer with a conscience and a growing list of white crosses in his wake.

   I have a taste for Westerns, and bend to no one in my love of the more common pulp Western from Zane Gray to Louis L’Amour and the men and women who write them, but there is another kind of Western, the more literary model, the Western as novel, and not just story that I admire. It is no attack on the former to admire the latter.

   It’s a sub-genre of the more popular form with a history in itself with familiar names like Owen Wister, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Walter Van Tilberg Clark, Frederick Manfred, Dorothy Johnson, Wallace Stegner, Conrad Richter, Oakley Hall, Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and now one I never knew about before, Charles O. Locke. Titles like The Oxbow Incident, The King of Spades, A Man Called Horse, Sea of Grass, Shane, The Last Hunt, Warlock, Blood Meridian, and Lonesome Dove are among its more famous examples.

   As you might imagine, it’s rarer to discover a book in this category than in the more familiar form and a time to celebrate when you do.

    The Hell Bent Kid is a pure example of the form. The plot may be straight out of a hundred pulp Western fantasies, but this is a novel and not just a tale. It is about the destruction of a young man forced to run and fight through brutal country against hard men who learn too late his almost mystical skill with a gun. It is about a good kid forced to become a killer, a decent young man who doesn’t want to be what his hunters make him into, who meets a girl, has a brief moment of normalcy, and is forced to take up the gun one last time.

      It’s the inevitability of Tot Lohman’s fate that makes this a novel and not just a well written pulp tale. The same story appeared in a thousand Western pulps and original paperbacks and still does today, but seldom written with the simplicity and human understanding of this version.

   It’s no coincidence this one ends in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, though Tot Lohman is no Billy the Kid, and his fate isn’t met at the hands of a Pat Garrett.

   There is no shortage of standard Western thrills here, but there hangs over the book a hint of Greek tragedy, of hard country written on men’s souls, and burned in women’s broken hearts and too short lives. As I said at the beginning I had never heard of this book or of Locke, but now I will look for his name and treasure this book.

   Told in epistolary form, a long section in the middle by Tot himself, the book is as easy to read as any Western, it just has a little more to say than most, the difference between a great B Western film and John Ford, between blazing guns and the smell of gunsmoke and the exposed souls of the people involved.

   The Hell Bent Kid was made into a decent film in 1958, From Hell To Texas, directed by Henry Hathaway. It’s a pretty good little film aimed at focusing on younger stars, but it is a pale adaptation of the novel, much more a standard Western than the well-written novel this book is.

STEVE SHERMAN -The White Mountain Murders. Hugh Quint #2. Walker, hardcover, 1989. No paperback edition. (See also comment #2.)

   Hugh Quint, ex-Boston cop, now a PI, heads for New Hampshire to help find the half-sister of a friend and ends up preventing the theft of a $100,000 antique chest. Several murders occur as well, he most obvious suspect being a back-to-nature Abenaki Indian.

   The same Indian who’s gone off with the half-sister who started it all. The detective work is slight, and most of the book’s charm comes from the rustic setting and the bucolic nature of its inhabitants. Unfortunately it begins to wear off about halfway through.

       The Hugh Quint series —

The Maple Sugar Murders. Walker 1987
The White Mountain Murders. Walker 1989
Primary Crime. Appledore 2000

THE QUIET GUN. Regal Films / 20th Century Fox, 1957. Forrest Tucker, Mara Corday, Jim Davis, Kathleen Crowley, Lee Van Cleef, Tim Brown. Based on the novel Law Man, by Lauren Paine. Director: William F. Claxton

   Sheriff Carl Brandon (Forrest Tucker) is a man with a code. The quiet but strong type, he is the lawman of a Western frontier town. With a live and let live attitude, he does not seem to have all that much to do, other than keep things calm. All that changes when the city attorney comes to his office and tells him that he and the town are about to file an immorality complaint against rancher Ralph Carpenter (Jim Davis).

   Carpenter’s alleged crime? Relations with a teenage Indian girl named Irene (Mara Corday). After all, his beautiful wife has temporarily left him due to marital troubles and it can’t simply be that the Indian girl is his servant? Can it?

   Brandon warns the city attorney to let it be. First of all, Carpenter is an old friend of his. But more importantly, the good sheriff knows that provoking Carpenter will be like provoking a bear and will likely result in bloodshed. The city attorney is determined, however, to have his say and ends up getting himself killed by Carpenter.

   What follows is a compelling hour or so of action and drama in which Brandon investigates what happened at the ranch and attempts to uncover the conspiracy that ends up getting Carpenter and Irene murdered before it all ends. This leads him into a direct conflict with saloon owner John Reilly (Tim Brown) and cattle rustler Doug Sadler (Lee Van Cleef).

   In many ways The Quiet Gun could just have easily been a pilot for a late 1950s TV Western with Forrest Tucker cast as the lead, but the movie transcends the limitations of the small screen with some stark visuals, a hardy cynicism, and a rather dismal view of the human propensity to gossip. It would seem as if nearly every man in the town except Brandon and his deputy, the kind, but mentally slow Sampson (portrayed by Hank Worden, known for his association with John Ford).

   There’s not much in this Regal Films production that you haven’t seen before – a man quietly in love with his friend’s wife; a lynch mob exacting brutal frontier justice; and a sheriff holed up in his office determined to make sure that his prisoners face a judge rather than a street mob – but one thing I noticed in The Quiet Gun is that nary a minute is wasted. This is a taut, well-edited film and one that deserves more attention.

DIAL RED O. Allied Artists, 1955. Bill Elliott, Helene Stanley, Keith Larsen, Paul Picerni, Jack Kruschen, Elaine Riley. Written and directed by Daniel B. Ullman.

   Getting too old for the B-westerns he’d been making, and with B-westerns on their way out anyway, “Wild” Bill Elliott ended his movie-making career with five low budget police dramas from Allied Artists. This is the first of the five, all of them recently released in a box set from Warner Archives.

   Strangely enough, Elliott never appeared once on television, so when the five crime films didn’t pan out, he seems to have disappeared quietly into retirement. I’ve had the five movies on a want list for quite a while, but while Dial Red O is perfectly acceptable for what it is, I was also disappointed. Except for possibly some of the lighting effects and a jazzy score by Shorty Rogers and his group, there are no noir aspects to the film at all.

   Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But Dial Red O could easily almost have been an extended version of Dragnet on TV, without the monotone deliveries and the distinctive “Dum – – – de – DUM – DUM.”

   Not that Elliott doesn’t speak in terse, clipped tones himself. In this film he’s a Hollywood police lieutenant named Andy Flynn, and the fugitive he’s after is an escapee from an army psychiatric hospital whose wife had just divorced him.

   The wife, played by Helene Stanley, has been playing around. After she’s killed by her married lover, the fugitive Flynn os looking for is the obvious suspect.

   From here on, or even before, there are no frills, only straight-forward police work. Nothing less, but nothing more, either.