RICHARD S. PRATHER “Sinner’s Alley.” Shell Scott. First published in Have Gat — Will Travel. Reprinted in The Young Punks, edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid G271, paperback original, 1957).
This story takes LA-based PI Shell Scott out of his usual milieu of young blonde and busty Hollywood starlets into the much edgier world of juvenile delinquency, or hoodlums on the loose. Even though the latter come straight from standard casting, they sure give Shell Scott Scott all he can handle, if not more.
His client is a man whose daughter has been found murdered and raped, her face so badly damaged that Shell is the one who has to identify her in the morgue. His boiling point is so over the top that he makes the bad mistake of trying to confront the young hoods in their den. Not a good idea.
The resulting couple of melees are well choreographed, I can tell you that. You needn’t worry that the equally tough Shell Scott will come out on top in this one or not, though, but in the telling, there’s not much humor in this one. Prather plays it straight and tense until the very end, when — well, I won’t tell you, but the ending does fit the pattern of most of his fiction after all.
Postscript: The subject matter of The Young Punks, the anthology n which I read this one should be obvious from the title. Most of the stories come from Manhunt, written by such authors as Gil Brewer, Evan Hunter, Richard Deming, Jonathan Craig and so on. It’s well wortht he small amount of money it would take to obtain a copy today, if JD fiction has any kind of appeal to you at all.
One of the striking benefits of satellite [TV] is the quality of the transmissions with a picture that approaches the quality of a laser disc. Add to this the superior condition of many of the prints Turner [Classic Movies] screens, and the result can be extraordinary, as it was in The Kennel Murder Case (1933), one of a series of screenings of Philo Vance films.
The taut, swift direction by Michael Curtiz and the acting of the first-rate cast [William Powell as Philo Vance, Mary Astor, Eugene Pallette, Ralph Morgan, Robert McWade as District Attorney Markham, Robert Barrat] have probably not been displayed to better advantage in years.
The film opens with a striking overhead shot of a New York mansion, but much of the action takes place inside the house, where any efforts of artful lighting are undermined by the print.
Much better and something of a return to the glossy form that marked the best of the MGM Vances was The Casino Murder Case (1935; dir. Edwin L. Marin) with Vance played by Paul Lucas. Maltin doesn’t like Lucas, whom he calls stolid with a thick accent. Stolid certainly describes Rathbone’s performance, but I found Lucas to be charming and polished, with only a slight accent.
Rosalind Russell has one of her early roles here as Vance’s unofficial sidekick. The supporting cast includes: Alison Skipworth, Eric Blore, Ted Healy, Donald Cook, Leo G. Carroll and William Demarest, and I enjoyed this even though the mystery was resolved with a not-very-convincing nutty murder confrontation.
THE NEW ADVENTURES OF NERO WOLFE “The Case of the Disappearing Diamonds.” NBC, 30 minutes. March 9, 1951. Sydney Greenstreet, Harry Bartell. Story: Mindret Lord.
As a radio series The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe was heard for one short season on NBC, running from October 20, 1950, to April 27, 1951. There had been two earlier versions: The Adventures of Nero Wolfe, a 1943–44 series on ABC starring Santos Ortega and Luis van Rooten, and The Amazing Nero Wolfe, a 1945 series on Mutual starring Francis X. Bushman, but there’s no denying that Sydney Greenstreet was well nigh perfectly cast for the role.
For a season of only 26 shows, though, the series went though quite a few people playing Archie. Besides Harry Bartell, they included such well known radio voices as Gerald Mohr, Herb Ellis, Lawrence Dobkin, Lamont Johnson and Wally Maher. It probably didn’t matter to radio audiences all that much who played the part back then, however. The combo of Nero Wolfe and Sydney Greenstreet was, I’m sure, all they needed.
I’m not so sure about the stories, though, not if this is an example. It begins with a sneak thief named Willie Inch asking Wolfe to help him prove he didn’t kill the lady of the house after he’d burgled it, and quite successfully, too. It’s too bad he left fingerprints behind, as well as the body of the lady.
And oh, yes, a small fortune in diamonds is also missing, but Willie Inch did not take them. Someone else had larceny on his (or her) mind the very same evening. There is also a beautiful young woman involved. She claims to be a writer and wants to do a story about Wolfe. Archie demurs, saying that a fellow named Rex Stout is already writing up his adventures. After Wolfe proves she’s a fraud, that doesn’t stop Archie for making a play for her — to his regret.
But the ending is very weak and terribly rushed. Something could have made of the gimmick involved, but as it was, that’s all is was, only a gimmick. The trappings of the Wolfean stories are there, but there’s not solid enough in this episode to make me want to listen to another. I’ll stick to the books, and the Maury Chaykin-Timothy Hutton TV show that was how on A&E a while back. As an adaption of one of my favorite detective series, it was most satisfactory.
ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Shapely Shadow. Perry Mason #63. William Morrow, hardcover, 1960. Pocket 4507, paperback, 1962. Ballantine, paperback, 1982. Reprinted many times.
This one begins at Della’s strong suggestion. She notices that the woman who asking for Mason’s advice is deliberately toning down her appearance, making herself as unattractive as possible. Why? She’s the secretary of a successful businessman, and Della assumes (correctly) that she’s in love with him, and she doesn’t want his current wife to have any reason to have her fired.
What attracts Perry’s attention, though, is the suitcase full of money she has with her. She thinks that her employer is being blackmailed, and this is the money she’s to put into a train locker, with the key to be sent to an address he’s given her.
When the man ends up dead, however, Perry’s client is the number one suspect, along with the other two women in his life: his wife and his ex-wife, who it is obvious would like nothing nothing better than to win him back.
The case is so deliciously complicated that Perry figuratively throws up his hands. The evidence points directly to his client, but she is adamant that she didn’t do it. The fireworks in court is really what makes this book really sizzle, though. When the odds are so far against you, maybe the only thing to do, Mason decides, is to take a chance.
He does, he succeeds, and Hamilton Burger fails again. This one has what every Perry Mason reads Perry Mason books for.
I bought this LP when it first came out in December 1968, and it knocked my socks off. I played so often I think I wore the grooves down to nubbins. I wasn’t the only one. It won the 1970 Grammy Award for Album of the Year.
BART PAUL – Under Tower Peak. Tommy Smith #1. Arcade, hardcover, April 2013; paperback, November 2014.
Early in the season we rode up to the forks to fix the trail above the snow cabin. The winter had been good and the aspens had leafed out down in the canyon at the edges of the meadows. Above The Roughs up in the tamarack pines it was shady and cool once the trail got narrow, and the only sounds were the steady scuff of the horses’ hooves as they kicked up little puffs of dust and the clack when an iron shoe struck a rock as they climbed, the rush of the creek off in the timber, and the breeze through the tamarack limbs.
It isn’t often when reading a mystery, Western, thriller, or combination of the three I find myself thinking in terms of writers like Ernest Hemingway, Tom Lea, Cormac McCarthy, and Jim Harrison, and at the same time hearing echoes of Craig Johnson, Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, and Stephen Hunter, but Bart Paul’s Under Tower Peak evokes all those and in the best way possible, and manages a sense of humor to boot, as hero Tommy Smith and his pal Lester lie under the stars in California’s Sierra Nevadas.
“In the moonlight the plane looks like some spacecraft crashed on Mars,†he (Lester) said. “You ever think about outer space?â€
“Not ever.â€
“You see those movies with guys standing all alone on some distant planet a gazillion miles out in deep space with some weird moon on the horizon. But what if we’re the ones on the distant planet and all this just over our heads is deep space, all cold and huge and empty? You ever think that lying here we’re flying a million miles an hour in outer space right now?â€
“One of us is, that’s a fact.â€
Loosely suggested by the crash of businessman adventurer Steve Fossett’s plane in 2008, the novel finds former sniper Tommy Smith and his friend Lester in the high country where they discover the crashed plane of a missing billionaire adventurer. That’s a seemingly harmless enough fact, but it soon turns complicated when Lester takes an expensive Rolex off the dead man and some of the money carried in a bag on the plane. Once back in civilization his less than ethical sometime girlfriend Callie Dean, local tramp with a not quite heart of gold, contacts the family lawyers about a reward and when she shows up dead after talking to a man in a fancy car the stops are out.
Lester’s moment of greed has let loose the hell hounds as the dead man’s trophy wife and drug lord son, and their legal and illegal cadre of backers are soon threatening Tommy and Lester, and crawling all over the Sierra Nevada’s willing to kill for something related to the dead man and the crash that Tommy has no clue to. Innocent people are dying and Tommy’s one time friend idiot Sheriff Mitch isn’t up to handling the mess he has on his hands.
As the wife’s attractive lawyer Nora explains why Gerald, the son needs the father to be alive or he could lose a fortune she warns Tommy:
“…Gerald’s father is dead,†she said. “You saw the body?â€
“He’s dead, alright. Lester and me were as close to the body as I am to you.â€
“That, Sergeant Smith,†she said, “makes you both very inconvenient people to leave walking around.â€
That’s setup enough for a solid tale of adventure, violence, and the hard won values of uncorrupted but not scrupulously honest men vs corrupt and ruthlessly violent ones, but Paul ups the ante not only by his evocative writing, but in his character of his reluctant but all too proficient hero who turns out to be equal parts John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and James Bond.
“You scared me when you pulled out the knife,†she said.
“Probably not much I could have done.â€
She sort of leaned in to me and her heat just poured out. I held the shirt tight around her.
“I doubt that,†she said. “It was like you were on a mission or something.â€
Even the gun-lore here, which in some writers’ hands is little more than gun porn, is part of the plot and the nature of the protagonist, never overdone, or less than vital to the story at hand.
It doesn’t take much to guess Smith and Lester are going to find themselves out numbered and out gunned against a small army of dangerous and violent people, but the fact that Paul makes that pay off again and again in ways that evoke the best writers of this kind of tale, James Lee Burke is another name that comes to mind, is remarkable.
After Gerald’s Cuban friends blow up his cabin Tommy lies in wait on a bridge for them.
When he was almost halfway across, I reached down and felt for the wire and the big plastic switch and thumbed it on. It was a full second before the generator fired up about a hundred yards away and another second until four big halogen spots flared on in a semicircle behind me and lit up that bridge like noon. The Escalade stopped hard, then started to back up, slow at first, the driver halfblind from the spots. I thumbed off the safety then and squeezed off a round into the road on my side of the bridge just so they could hear the shot and see the dirt kick up. The driver hit the gas, and one back wheel started to spin on the iron plate between the planks. In that bright light I could see the two Cubans in the front seat scrambling as the car drifted ass-first to one side. When the spinning rear wheel hit the planks, it bit into the wood and got instant traction. The driver overcorrected, and that wheel slid off the upstream edge of the bridge. I fired a second shot way over their heads and saw the front tires jerk sideways like they thought they could still back themselves out of trouble. The Escalade tilted, and the left front wheel went over the edge too. The whole thing hovered there for a second until it rolled off the bridge and splashed into the creek on its side. With the front windows open it sunk fast. When I could see the headlights under water, I snapped off the switch, and the spotlights dimmed out and the bridge went dark.
Naturally at some point Tommy and Lester decide the law isn’t going to take its course in time to save their lives or avenge Callie, who was trying her hand at extortion, and decide to take things in their own hands against the advice of Deputy Sarah Cathcart who tries to protect them both.
This isn’t just an action suspense piece either, there is a decent mystery and noirish plot and some good detective work along the way putting the complicated ends of the story together with billions of dollars at stake, and something else Tommy can’t guess at drawing all the firepower, legal and not.
One more good rain and it would be as if that old boy had never hit that mountain, had never missed that pass. It would be like he was just flying around over us forever, trying to find his way home. At least that’s how I like to think of it. And except for me, and now Sarah, any folks who would tell otherwise are dead. We kept on riding past The Roughs and disappeared into the trees.
Paul is a writers’ writer, literate and literary without beating it over the readers head. Reading this book is not only a pleasure as escapist literature, but in watching a capable and gifted writer practice his craft with precision and style. His work invokes not just the obvious names, but writers like Edward Abbey, Oliver Lange, Newton Thornberg, Will Bryant, A. B. Guthrie, and Clair Huffaker, and that is notable company for any writer, in the genre or out.
The Tommy Smith series —
1. Under Tower Peak (2013)
2. Cheatgrass (2016)
3. See That My Grave is Kept Clean (2019)
ROBERT LESLIE BELLEM “Suicide Scenario.” Novelette. Nick Ransom #6 (*). First published in Thrilling Detective, February 1948. Collected in Nick Ransom, Confidential Investigator (UPDproductions, Kindle edition, 2018).
If you thought this was going to be a review of one of Bellem’s “Dan Turner” stories, I can hardly blame you. After all, one source I found says that he wrote over 300 of them. But that’s only a small percentage of Bellem’s output, estimated by that same source to be in the 3000 range, almost all of it in the form of short fiction.
After appearing in a run of five stories in the early 40s, Nick Ransom took up shop in the pages of Thrilling Detective in 1948 for a run of nine more tales, beginning with “Suicide Scenario” in the February 1948 issue. Previously a Hollywood stunt man with is own business called “Risks Incorporated,” Ransom has decided that business wasn’t good enough and has changed the sign on he door to “Nick Ransom, Investigations.” Hollywood being the town it is, not only have bit players come calling, but so have producers, directors, stars, and “assorted geniuses of every size and gender.
He doesn’t have a client in this tale, however. While driving back to his office through the streets of Los Angeles, he stopped by a frantic woman who needs him to stop her husband from committing suicide. Which he does, cleanly and efficiently. It turns out (not surprisingly) that there’s more to the story. The man whom he stopped from shooting himself turns out to have been hired to play the part, and then the real husband is found, his face blown away.
This is not all. There are more twists and turns ahead. This is a real detective story, with lots of clues and red herrings to follow and be sorted out. Plus Bellem’s usual skill with the English language, somewhat toned down from the Dan Turner stories, and no emphasis at all on various parts of the female anatomy which took up a lot of space to describe back in Turner’s Spicy Detective days.
Well, not completely. Quoting from the first page:
She came running through the rain, a tall and shapely muffin whose soaked dress plastered itself to her bountiful curves like Scotch tape. Her hair was long and unpent, a black cascade streaming back over her shoulders as she pelted up to me, and the frantic urgency on her mush was enough to give a man the fantods. If ever a tomato was in trouble, this one obviously was.
—
The Nick Ransom series —
Peril for Sale (ss) Detective Dime Novels Apr 1940
Danger’s Delegate (ss) Red Star Detective Jun 1940
Hazard’s Harvest (ss) Red Star Detective Aug 1940
Jeopardy’s Jackpot (ss) Red Star Detective Oct 1940
Risks Redoubled (nv) Double Detective Aug 1941
Suicide Scenario (nv) Thrilling Detective Feb 1948
Mahatma of Mayhem (nv) Thrilling Detective Apr 1948
The 9th Doll (nv) Thrilling Detective Aug 1948
Serenade with Slugs (nv) Thrilling Detective Dec 1948
Homicide Shaft (nv) Thrilling Detective Apr 1949
Preview of Murder (nv) Thrilling Detective Jun 1949
Puzzle in Peril (nv) Thrilling Detective Oct 1949
Blind Man’s Fluff (nv) Thrilling Detective Feb 1950
Murder Steals the Scene (nv) Thrilling Detective Aug 1950
(*) There is a Nick Ransom in the story “Short Cut to Vengeance” in the December 1939 issue of Variety Detective as by John Gregory, but the latter is known to be a house name and no one seems to have connected it up with Bellem.
MICHAEL CONNELLY – The Last Coyote. Harry Bosch #4. Little Brown, hardcover, 1995. St. Martin’s, paperback, 1996.
Connelly is without question one of the most highly regarded crime writers of the nineties. That his 1994’s The Concrete Blonde was not shortlisted for an Edgar tells you all you need to know about the MWA’s awards process.
He wouldn’t be Harry if he didn’t have troubles. His house has been condemned because of earthquake damage, his lover has left him, he’s drinking too much,and he’s been suspended and forced to see the Department psychiatrist because he shoved a superior officer’s face through a window. A closed one.
His remedy? To investigate the murder of his mother, unsolved (covered up?) when she was killed over 30 years ago. Old bones, buried secrets, and a road that could lead either to redemption of or the bottom of the long slide.
Connelly’s strengths are to me a little harder to analyze than those of some. There’s no one facet of his writing that says, “Here’s a Connelly book.” The primary appeal is the character of Harry himself, I guess, but Connelly is the complete package — his prose is excellent, his pacing outstanding, and the characters other than Harry quite go.
His only weakness for me has been his plotting, but that has improved with each book. And this is a particularly good book, deepening the characterization and conveying a sustained mood of darkness and desperation. But then, Harry and his tales never were rays of sunshine, were they?
Connelly is one of the better.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #18, February-March 1995.
I’LL BE SEEING YOU. Selznick/Unired Artists, 1944. Ginger Rogers, Joseph Cotten, Shirley Temple, Spring Byington and Tom Tully. Adapted by Marion Parsonnet from a radio play by Charles Martin. Directed by William Diertele and George Cukor.
Among the oddest of Christmas films, I’ll Be Seeing You offers a deceptively simple tale and makes it resonate with surprising counter-rhythms and a touch of noir.
The plot in brief: It’s the Holidays, and Ginger Rogers is visiting relatives in a small town, but after New Year’s Day she has to go back to Prison, where she’s serving a six-year stretch for Manslaughter.
On the train, she meets Zach Morgan (Joseph Cotten) a soldier who impulsively decides to get off at her stop and get to know her. But after the Holidays, he too must return — to a VA hospital where he’s being treated for what we now call PTSD.
The romance that follows is built like a fragile house of cards as we see them start to build trust in each other, confidence in themselves and tentative plans for a future that just ain’t gonna happen; he’s got to go back to the Hospital (she doesn’t know it) and she must return to Prison (he doesn’t know it) and even as love grows in the holiday climate, tension builds as we wonder what will happen when they find out….
Director Diertele heightens the drama by stressing the small town atmosphere and the loving cohesion of Ginger’s family (Tom Tully, Spring Byington and Shirly Temple at that awkward adolescent age.) Her furlough has been hard fought-for, and the depth of feeling when she reunites with her family is.. well it’s one of those moments we watch Movies for. Joseph Cotten is welcomed by her family…
….And then it hit me: This is the reverse side of Shadow of a Doubt (Universal, 1944 – just a year earlier!). We have Joseph Cotten once again as a man with a secret coming to a small town and ingratiating himself with an All-American Family. Only this time, Ginger is the killer, and the flashback to her crime has a haunting Woolrichesque quality to it that matches anything in Shadow.
As I watched both films I saw how Cotten incorporated elements of one character into the other and differentiated them at the same time. Both men are charming, but Zach ‘s charm is a clumsy, off-hand thing, while Uncle Charlie’s is a practiced act. Both men wear masks, but Cotten lets Uncle Charlie’s mask slip to chilling effect, while Zach’s mask crumbles heart-wrenchingly. Watching both films back to back I gained a new appreciation of Joseph Cotten’s talent, all too rarely used and too often wasted.
But all this is a sidebar at best. I’ll Be Seeing You is a moving if modest triumph of off-beat movie-making. A film of genuine charm and feeling. And perfect for the Christmas Season.
SHOOT TO KILL. Screen Arts Pictures, 1947. Also released as Police Reporter. Russell Wade, Luana Walters [as Susan Walters], Edmond MacDonald, Robert Kent [as Douglas Blackley], Nestor Paiva. Director: William Berke.
This tough-minded B-programmer from 1947 was included in a box set of Noir films, and in that category, it’s certainly marginal, if not a full-fledged entry. It’s told in flashback form, with at least one flashback within the first one, but not confusingly. I don’t think anyone will any problems following the story.
It begins with the current acting D. A. (Edmond MacDonald) being found dead in a car, having gone over one of those cliffs that are always on the outskirts of town in B-movies like this one. In this case, though, what makes the headline of the day is that also in the car is Dixie Logan (Douglas Blackley), one of the town’s most notorious gangsters, also dead. Surviving the crash is the D.A.’s recently wedded wife (Susan Walters).
The flashback begins as the latter tells her story to the sympathetic ear of reporter ‘Mitch’ Mitchell, played by extremely soft-spoken Russell Wade. None of the players in this picture ever made it big in Hollywood, as I’m sure you’ve realized already, but most of them had long careers in movies very much like this one — speaking budget-wise, of course.
Susan Walters, most often billed in her many movie appearances as Luana Walters — many of them westerns — was making a bit of a comeback in Shoot to Kill , her first film in several years, but to little avail, making only five more after this one (including a short role as Superman’s mother in the 1948 serial). Still very beautiful at the age of 35, she also shows more weariness than the role calls for, caused, one imagines, by tragedy and other problems in her personal life.
I’m not a big fan of movies told in flashback format, but I have to admit that in this case what it does is to introduce an element of mystery to the entire proceedings, producing a puzzle that would have been harder to create if the tale had to build up to it in purely linear fashion.
More. There are plenty of dark shadows in this one, along with a dash of dark-edged violence as a double-edged bonus. Add plenty of mysterious goings-on and some better than average plot twists along the way, making the 64 minutes of running time just the right length for more than your money’s worth of entertainment.
Note: This is a slightly revised version of a review first posted on this blog in August 2009.
