DALE L. GILBERT – Murder Begins at Home. Carter Winfield & Matt Doyle #3. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1989. No paperback edition.

   Ever wonder what it would be like if Nero Wolfe and his gang were to move to San Diego, take up new identities and went back into business? Well, dream on. This isn’t it, but it’s close. Slightly whacked ouyand steamed up, but close. Blame it on Californication.

   Matt Doyle is the legman for reclusive/exclusive PI Carter Winfield, and in this case,they go to work (under duress) for a Mafia kingpin who needs a bodyguard for hi family. The writing is vaguely reminiscent of the pulps, but the characters are vividly drawn.

{UPDATE]   I followed this at the time with a footnote that included a detailed description of what I found to be a serious plot flaw. Reading it now, though, I found it boring and uninteresting. Deciding that you would too, in the context of a review that I now consider to be far too short, I’ve omitted it.

   What I really would like to know now is more about the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin connection. I didn’t go into that very well back in 1989, and I guess the only way I’m going to be able to is to find my copy of this book and read it again.

   This was the final book in the series. It was preceded by The Black Star Murders (1988) and The Mother Murders (1989). Dale Gilbert, the author, died in 1988.

BRIAN CLEEVE – Vice Isn’t Private. Sean Ryan #3. Random House, hardcover, 1966. Lancer 73-621, paperback, 1967. First published in the UK as The Judas Goat (Hammond, hardcover, 1966).

   Somewhere between the suave James Bond, the tough minded Quiller, and Len Deighton’s nameless (in the books anyway) Chandler-voiced cynical operative there was Brian Cleeve and his creation, former IRA killer turned reluctant British agent, Sean Ryan.

   Like many of his fellow British spy writers, Cleeve was a former intelligence operative, but unlike most, he chose a darker and less glamorous path. You wonder if Ryan ever owned a dinner jacket; in fact, you wonder if he owned a decent suit most of the time.

   This gritty thriller opens with Ryan recently rescued from prison by a cold-blooded major (is there any other kind in spy fiction) to work for counter-intelligence, “You don’t have to know anything, just do what you are told.”

   Kathy O’Hara’s “friend,” Mike Rafferty, is in Garside prison, and a fixer named Harry Marks has arranged for a meeting with Ryan as the man to get him out, but Harry is under the thumb of brutal gangster Guilio Romano, and he sings like a bird that Ryan is “Big Law”.

   Ryan’s job is to get Rafferty out, disguising the fact he has the government behind him, follow him and retrieve the photographs Rafferty is blackmailing a cabinet minister with. Not just any cabinet minister either, Garrett Cameron-Harvey, the Home Secretary.

   To this point, this entry in the series is pretty clearly based on Sean Bourke’s book about breaking traitor George Blake out of prison and smuggling him out of England to Russia. It was a good story as true spy stories go, demonstrated by the fact it was the basis for Desmond Bagley’s Freedom Trap (John Huston’s The MacIntosh Man) and would have been the basis for a Hitchcock film had he lived.

   It made headlines and Bourke’s book was a bestseller, optioned but not filmed itself.

   Of course nothing is ever that simple in any spy novel, much less suspense novel, and the same is true of this one.

   Complicating things farther is the source of the Home Secretary’s blackmail, Irina Mortimer, a discrete dominatrix who has reasons of her own to keep his secrets from destroying her access to a very elite clientele in Europe and England.

   The escape proves the easiest of Ryan’s tasks, which escalate when Romano kidnaps Rafferty in order to get the papers for himself, leaving Ryan to rescue Rafferty, retrieve the photographs, and get Rafferty and Kathy O’Hara out of England and well away from the Home Secretary, all complicated by Ryan’s growing hate of Rafferty and desire for Kathy, and Cameron-Harvey himself on the thin edge threatening to collapse under the threat.

    Vice Isn’t Private is a tight and lean book, under two hundred pages, far from today’s bloated thrillers. There isn’t an extraneous word or missed beat, the violence shocking and sometimes sadistic, the suspense palpable, and Ryan a fascinating protagonist torn between his violent past and glimpses of a world away from it he can never quite reach, all told in tough and sometimes poetic prose by Cleeve, who later went on to write bestselling historical fiction.

BACKLASH. Universal International, 1956. Richard Widmark, Donna Reed, William Campbell, John McIntire, Barton MacLane, Harry Morgan, Robert J. Wilke, Jack Lambert, Roy Roberts, Edward C. Platt, Robert Foulk. Screenplay: Borden Chase, based on the novel Fort Starvation by Frank Gruber, reviewed here. Director: John Sturges.

   Here’s a gaudy little B-movie which I found enjoyable out of all proportion to its actual merit. Written by Borden (Red River) Chase, directed by John Sturges (Great Escape, Magnificent Seven) and done up in lurid Universal Technicolor, this is in every inch a “B,” never mind the budget, cowboys, Indians, lost treasure and what-all else you need for a Saturday afternoon.

   The plot hangs loosely on the peg of Richard Widmark looking for the man who killed his Pa — or more precisely, the an who let Dad and four others get butchered by Indians instead of going for help, then took the gold they were carrying out of Indian country.

   To this end, Widmark does some exemplary sleuthing, poring over old testimony, double-checking witnesses, exploring the crime scene and wisecracking in the best PI tradition (“There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you since we first met — Goodbye!”) with “tough gal” Donna Reed, who plays the possibly treacherous female lead like Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo or The Killers.

   There are suggestions here that this could have been a better movie, though perhaps less fun: as the story progresses we find that Widmark is not so much pursuing his dad’s killer as he is trying to live up to a father whose love he never knew. Anthony Mann or Delmar Daves would have pursued the oedipal complexities of this, but Sturges just shrugs it off and brings on the Indians.

   And the gunfights, fistfights, and chases with the lean technical skill typical of him, and even a certain amount of humor. I particularly enjoyed the spirited thesping of third-billed William Campbell: he’s only in the movie for a few minutes, but he plays a black-clad giggling gunfighter just like Richard Widmark’s Tommy Udo of a decade earlier.

   Tuba Skinny is a traditional jazz band based in New Orleans. The female singer in this video is Erika Lewis (no relation).

BOSTON LEGAL “Head Cases.” ABC, 60 min. Season 1, Episode 1. 03 October 2004. James Spader (Alan Shore), William Shatner (Denny Crane), Rhona Mitra, Lake Bell, Mark Valley, Rene Auberjonois, Monica Potter. Created by David E. Kelley. Director: Bill D’Elia.

   William Shatner will be known for now and forever as Captain James Kirk of the starship Enterprise, but I think that totally irreverent hotshot Boston lawyer Denny Crane is the role he was always meant to play. His view of things is that he’s still at the top of his game, but in this first episode of Boston Legal, his underlings and associates are beginning to wonder if he’s still up to the job.

   This series had a large ensemble cast, and since some of the players came over from a preceding series called The Practice, which I never saw (and in fact this is the first time I’ve seen an episode of this series), it took me a while to put together who was who and what connection they may have to each other.

   There are a quite a few cases the firm is working on as well, beginning with the head of the local office coming to a staff meeting sans pants (nor undershorts) and being carried away strapped down in a stretcher. The two major ones are (1) a major client of the firm demanding that a PI be hired to follow his wife. Denny refuses, for good reason. He’s the one who’s sleeping with the wife. And (2) the mother of a young black girl wants to sue a theatrical company for not choosing her to play the part of Annie.

   James Spader is the first name in the cast listing, but it took me until I’d seen the second episode, not otherwise reviewed here, to understand how essential he is to the show’s chemistry. His unflappable refusal to ever be outwitted in a battle of words, in the office as well as in the courtroom, is a wonder to behold.

   By the way, I consider this a comedy, an extremely sophisticated one, but if you were to have been watching me watch this show and listening to me laugh out loud several times, and smile all of the rest of the time, you would know exactly what I mean. I also do not know how true this is in the real world, but not only are all of the women in this series knockout attractive, they’re wonderful actors too.

   It looks like I may be watching this series several nights a week for some time to come.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER -The Case of the Stuttering Bishop. Perry Mason. William Morrow, hardcover, 1936. Pocket #201, paperback, January 1943. Reprinted many more times. Film: First National / Warner Brothers, 1937 (Donald Woods, Ann Dvorak, Joseph Crehan). TV adaptation: Season 2 Episode 20 of Perry Mason ( 14 March 1959.

   This isn’t a review. I never finished the book. I got only so far and I stopped. Thinking I might try again where I let off, I realized that I didn’t really remember what was going on, so I stated skimmed through from the beginning, and taking notes as I went. Herewith, the players, with appropriate page numbers:

1. Perry Mason — the kind of attorney you’d want fighting for your interests if you ever get into a legal jam, except if you’re a rich father with an wastrel son, in which case he’ll turn you down flat, no matter much fee he could charge.

1. Bishop William Mallory — a visitor from Australia who comes to Mason as a client, wishing to know about the statute of limitations in a manslaughter case; the problem is, he stutters — is he a real bishop?

5. Della Street — Mason’s highly trusted personal secretary; they go out together for the occasional meal and dancing, but any closer on a personal basis, they never get.

7. Paul Drake — head of a private detective agency with seemingly unlimited manpower at his beck and call; Mason hires him to check out the bishop as well as any manslaughter cases still open from 22 years before.

10. a cab driver — the one who brought the bishop to Mason’s building; he was asked to wait, but the bishop seems to have gone out a back way without paying the fare.

11. Jackson — Mason’s law clerk, a quite capable individual, but a non-factor in this story.

12. Jim Pauley — house detective at the hotel where the bishop is checked in; he has a sharp eye: he noticed someone following the bishop when he went out, and a redheaded dame who was waiting for him when he returned; when she leaves, he goes up to the bishop’s room and discovers a fight has taken place in the bishop’s room and the bishop concussed (and sent to the hospital).

17. Charlie Downes — one of Drake’s operatives who was following the bishop, then the redhead.

19. Janice Seaton — the aforementioned redhead; she claims she’s a trained nurse who answered an ad placed in a newspaper by the bishop; she found the bishop injured, treated him and left him in bed.

27. Renwold C.Brownley, Oscar Brownley (son), and Julia Branner, who married Oscar 22 years before [as reported by Paul Drake] — but while the latter was driving their car after getting married, she hit and killed a man; hence the (trumped up) manslaughter charges. Oscar is now dead, but the girl thought to be his daughter is living with Renwold; the girl’s mother is still a fugitive from justice.

32. Philip Brownley — [as Perry tells Della] a grandson of Renwold also living with him.

33. Janice Alma Brownley — [as Della tells Perry] Renwold’s granddaughter, who was on the same ship as the bishop as he traveled from Australia to the US; did the bishop suspect she was an imposter?

44. Julia Branner — in person, in Mason’s office; on the advice of the bishop, she is hoping to hire him as her attorney. The bishop has told her that the girl claiming to be her daughter (and Renwold’s granddaughter) is a fraud.

   From here, it gets complicated. When Renwold Brownley is supposedly shot and killed, no body can be found, in spite of eyewitnesses to the shooting. And what’s worse, the story that Mason’s client tells gets sounds fishier and fishier.

MICHAEL J. KATZ – Last Dance in Redondo Beach. Andy Sussman & Murray Glick #2. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1989. Pocket, paperback, 1990.

   Here’s a first. It’s gotta be. A professional wrestler dies, apparently of a heart attack, in a network’s “celebrity sports” competition. It’s really murder, of course, and on the scene, in his second brush with detective work is CBS sportscaster Andy Sussman.

   Doing most of the legwork, however, is his pal, a sleazy Chicago PI named Murray Glick, who works out of a Northbrook Court mall. You may have gotten the idea by now that the tone of this book is not entirely serious, but I surprised myself and enjoyed it anyway. (*)

       —

(*) I’d be remiss in pointing out, however, that I found the ending to be a bit too slick. The final confrontation works out far too easily — and not easily enough to avoid leaving a mess behind. Katz seems to think that justice is done, or at least his characters do, and in a sense they’re right, maybe as well as it ever does in real life, but I still think there’s some guilt not yet accounted for.

      The Andy Sussman & Murray Glick series —

Murder Off the Glass. Walker, 1987.
Last Dance in Redondo Beach. Putnam, 1989.
The Big Freeze. Putnam, 1991.

   The TV series Johnny Staccato lasted for one season on NBC between September 10, 1959 and March 24, 1960. It starred John Cassavetes as the title character, a jazz pianist who doubled as a private detective in his off hours. Elmer Bernstein was the composer of the music heard below:

ALEXANDRA SOKOLOFF – Book of Shadows. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, June 2010.

   I admit readily I am a sucker for an evocative opening, and this one does it in spades.

   Boston policemen Adam Garrett and Carl Landauer have caught a messy case, the dismembered body of a murdered teen left in a landfill. The two, different as night and day, are a good team, seasoned and skilled at their jobs, but this time they are about to be in over their heads, beginning with the black wax found on her, the number 333, and three triangles carved on her flawless skin.

   It’s not an ordinary sex murder, not an ordinary serial killer. That much is quickly apparent, and it soon gets worse when they find the victim is the daughter of a wealthy businessman.

   The ME soon confirms the cops worst fears, the not so faint breath of the Satanic is licking at the heels of the case like a hound of hell.

   But this is more than just some drug happy kids playing with blasphemy. Something more serious and more primal is going on, and the stench of sulfur and brimstone is palpable.

   I confess I love this sort of thing when it is done well as it is here. The mix of police procedural and growing horror is kept well in balance with the hero gradually facing despite everything there is more at stake than just a killer, more at hand than only brutal murder.

   Enter the attractive Tannith Cabarrus, who comes to the police to report she has dreamed three murders. Tannith isn’t a psychic, she’s a witch, and something evil is about, and the clencher is hard to deny;

   Of course Garrett and Tannith are going to become involved as the case spirals out of control and edges toward madness. Sokoloff has a sure hand, and keeps all the elements in the air as she juggles them with professional skill building to a suspenseful and dramatic confrontation with evil and madness well beyond the mere human kind.

   By downplaying the melodrama, Sokoloff succeeds in making it all the more effective when it does come, avoiding the too great reliance on eldritch lore and the weird for a solid blend of cop drama and supernatural thriller. It’s always a pleasure to be taken in hand by a gifted pro for a walk on the really wild side.

PETER DUNCAN – Sweet Cheat. Dell First Edition A182, paperback original; 1st printing, 1959. Cover art by Darcy (Ernest Chiriacka).

   The cover artist was worth mentioning, I thought, since it was his work that caught my eye and had me pick this off the shelf to read way ahead of several hundred other books. (What do you think? Wouldn’t you?) It turned out to be a good choice, too. I enjoyed the book as much as I did the fetching young lady on the cover.

   Buck Peters, who tells the story, is both the Chief of Police in his home town and a deacon in the local church, so he has something of a reputation to maintain with his Mama and the other elderly local ladies, which makes solving the town’s latest (and maybe the first in the long time) a task something like juggling three balls in the air blindfolded.

   Dead is a woman known as the town’s tramp, although that’s by reputation only. As much as she teased the menfolk’s healthy libidos, Buck knows that none of them had ever even made it to first base with her. What was the motive, then? Buck has a feeling that it was only frustration.

   What complicates everything — and thus takes up most of the story — is that the chief suspect is Kip Belton, the police commissioner himself, a man whose wife Buck has been diddling with (his word) since high school. Belton’s alibi is that he was with his wife at the time, but he was not. She was with Buck, doing what long-time lovers do whenever they can, and in the Beltons’ own back yard.

    What a predicament! Luckily Buck has similar goods on all the other men in town, and when it’s necessary, he’s not at all leery about making what he knows be known — much to the delight of Delbert, his deputy , who is a little sharper than Barney Fife, but not by a whole lot.

   It all works out in the end, and I was sorry the end came so soon. Highly recommended, if you happen to come across a copy — and if you go looking, it’s not a book that’s very hard to find.

   As for Peter Duncan, whose real name was Butler Markham Atkinson Jr., he has one other mystery novel in Hubin, a Gold Medal original entitled The Telltale Tart (1961). That one I’m going have to go looking for myself.