GYPSY WILDCAT. Universal Pictures, 1944. Maria Montez, Jon Hall, Peter Coe, Nigel Bruce, Leo Carrillo, Gale Sondergaard, Douglass Dumbrille. Director: Roy William Neill.
Last month AMC ran a bunch of those “Arabian Nights” Movies, which I blush to admit I watched and enjoyed while other, worthier tapes, languished on my shelves.
It doesn’t help a bit that these movies were mega-hits in the 40s, catapulted Jon Hall and Maria Montez to dubious stardom, and launched several mostly cheap and inferior imitations. I noted that Cobra Woman was directed by Robert Siodmak, in the bland, expressionless style that would become his trademark in the 60s, after all those wonderfully stylish films nour, and Gypsy Wildcat was done by that James-Whale-of-“B” -Movies — Roy William Neill — with all the panache poured into Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman and the Sherlock Holmes series.
Of course, in Gypsy Wildcat, the plot kind of got away from the writers: First the Gypsies sing, then they get taken prisoner by Evil Baron Douglass Dumbrille (who at least always managed to have a good time with his villainy) but Jon Hall escapes. Then he joins them and they’re all caught, so they decide to sing. Then Jon Hall escapes again and comes back for Maria Montez and they both escape, but then they get caught. One of the Gypsies escapes, then they all decide to escape, and to cover up the noise of their escape, they sing.
Having escaped, they prison the Guards, but then Douglass Dumbrille escapes with Maria Montez, so they chase after him, but while they’re gone, the guards escape and start chasing after the gypsies, who catch Doug just as the guards catch them and …
Well, I guess that’s why they call it Escapist Entertainment. But Damn, that Movie sure moves around a lot!
CYNTHIA HARROD-EAGLES – Grave Music. Inspector Bill Slider #3. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1995. Avon, paperback, 1996. Published previously in the UK as Dead End (Little Brown, hardover, 1994).
This is the third of the series I’ve read. I had some problems with the first, but thought the second was a bit better.
Life has been better for Inspector Bill Slider. His wife and mistress have left him more or less simultaneously. And his boss has hinted strongly that he should transfer. He hasn’t, and he’s paying for it. He and his ex-mistress, an orchestral musician, are thrown somewhat together again when a noted London conductor is murdered during a rehearsal. It’s one of those cases where the suspects include just about everyone who ever knew the dead man, who seems to have been thoroughly unlikable in every respect.
This is a series that seems to me to have gotten steadily better. Bill Slider is a genuinely likeable and sympathetic character, his one-time philandering notwithstanding, and so is his lover Joanna. Harrod-Eagles tells a good, straightforward story in prose equally so. Her characters and dialog are her strengths; her plot was serviceable, but the identity of the murderer seemed obvious early on.
These aren’t as gritty as John Harvey’s books, but they certainly aren’t light. I’d put them solidly in the mid-range of hard-edged British police stories.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #19, May 1995.
The Inspector Bill Slider series —
1. Orchestrated Death (1991)
2. Death Watch (1992)
3. Necrochip (1993) US title: Death to Go.
4. Dead End (1994) US title: Grave Music.
5. Blood Lines (1996)
6. Killing Time (1996)
7. Shallow Grave (1998)
8. Blood Sinister (1999)
9. Gone Tomorrow (2001)
10. Dear Departed (2004)
11. Game Over (2008)
12. Fell Purpose (2010)
13. Body Line (2011)
14. Kill My Darling (2012)
15. Blood Never Dies (2012)
16. Hard Going (2013)
17. Star Fall (2014)
18. One Under (2015)
19. Old Bones (2016)
20. Shadow Play (2017)
21. Headlong (2018)
THE LEAGUE OF FRIGHTENED MEN. Columbia Pictures, 1937. Walter Connolly, Lionel Stander, Eduardo Ciannelli, Irene Hervey. Screenplay by Guy Endore, Eugene Solow, & Edward Chodorov, based on the novel by Rex Stout. Directed by Alfred E. Green.
The bad things to begin with.
And in all honesty they are pretty bad.
Walter Connolly is simply awful as a nice, polite, annoyingly ambulatory Nero Wolfe (he was an even worse Father Brown), who unlike Edward Arnold in Meet Nero Wolfe, doesn’t even look fat enough for the part. He drinks hot cocoa instead of beer, and there is only a passing reference to food. We do passingly hear about orchids and see Wolfe using the phone to call Inspector Cramer from the greenhouse, and he punishes Cramer for “disrespecting the orchids,†but that and a bit of high-handed business from the book is about it far any glimpse of the real Wolfe goes save for one scene at the end.
He’s not even rude and he doesn’t say ‘pfui’ once.
This one even celebrates solving the case by taking Archie out for a drink.
He does live in a fairly decent recreation of the brownstone, though.
Fritz and Theodore don’t appear, instead Wolfe has a reformed crook named Butch as his butler, and if Sol and the boys don’t exactly show up, Archie has two “guys†he relies on.
And again there is Lionel Stander as Archie Goodwin, so thick we cannot believe Wolfe would employee him much less rely on him. We open with Archie bored and goading Wolfe to go to a movie with him. No, not teasing Wolfe, not deliberately tweaking his eccentric boss, no, admiringly wondering why Wolfe won’t go to a movie with him.
Archie is embarrassingly admiring of Wolfe throughout.
That said, Stander this time gets to do some decent leg work, and if he is a low rent thug and not so comic relief, he still follows Stout’s plot enough to do some decent detective work, though considering how casually Wolfe moves in and out of the brownstone it is hard to imagine why he even needs Archie.
Maybe he secretly wants to go see that murder mystery with him.
He still comes off better than Cramer. Archie doesn’t fall through a door on his face eavesdropping.
As in the book, Wolfe is approached by a member of a group of Harvard graduates who once took part in a hazing that crippled writer Paul Chapin. Now two of their members are dead, and they suspect Chapin is killing them off. Wolfe, in one thing at least like the real Wolfe, turns down the first millionaire in order to get all the “league of frightened men†to pay him.
And who should walk in on his two canes appearing threatening and sinister as Wolfe is making his selling point than Paul Chapin (Eduardo Cianelli, who is excellent as the bitter wounded man despite an accent no one really explains)?
There is another murder, and Chapin is caught red-handed, proving to Wolfe he can’t possibly be guilty.
The film does not depart too much from the book in most things. It even ends with a gathering of the suspects, and Wolfe, typically highhanded, catching the killer out, as usual in a way that would be absolutely useless in a courtroom if the killer just bluffed Cramer and called a lawyer.
I give Stout those scenes, I’ll give them to the movie.
As in the book, the best scene may be the final meeting of Wolfe and the ungrateful Chapin. Wolfe’s appreciation of the wounded proud man is the closest we get to seeing the real Nero.
As far as the mystery and plot, this one works better than the Arnold outing, and at least Connolly isn’t as annoyingly jolly as the chuckling Arnold (why is it so many actors play Wolfe as so much nicer and happier than Stout wrote him? William Conrad’s smiling was the worst part of his Wolfe).
The good things: there is some atmospheric camera work, a generally good cast of suspects, all well versed in playing the main bad guy, a fairly literate script despite the portraits of Wolfe and Archie, and above all else Eduardo Ciannelli.
But how anyone read those two books and ended up with Walter Connally and Lionel Stander as Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin…
That’s a mystery even Wolfe’s father couldn’t solve.
At least Eugene Pallette would have been fat and irritable enough, though I can’t quite wrap my head around William Powell as Archie or for that matter Errol Flynn.
I went looking, but I’ve not found out much of anything about the production company behind this, other than it was a Canadian project and it was made for television. As far as IMDb is concerned, Canada might just as well be a foreign country.
It’s one of those films that captures your attention for about 2/3 of the way through before verging off into a rather disappointing rest of the way. How it begins is as a detective story, then… well, I’ll get back to that. When the head of a tech company is murdered late at night, the Department of Defense sends an FBI agent to investigate. I’m not too clear on the details here, and writing down what I think happened, it’s even less clear, but when the agent is as good-looking as icy blonde Kathleen Robertson is, you are a little more forgiving about certain vageries of the story line.
Which is what I think the producers of the film had in mind during their casting sessions. In any case she is (mis)matched up with a young cop on the local police force (Gianpaolo Venuta) who has been on the job for only two weeks. Sigh. Why do things like this happen to me, she thinks. They turn out to be a good pair, however, and the early part of the story they do a goodly amount of fine detective work together, as other high-ranking members of the firm are also killed, one by one, and always at the same time: 10:44.
The detective business comes to an abrupt end, though, when the killer, feeling closed in upon, reveals him- or herself, and the rest of the movie takes on the guise of a less than ordinary thriller flick, as the pair try to stop the killer before he or she strikes again. Oh, well. It was a nice try until then.
The movie is made with some style, though and Robertson and Venuta seem to have had a good time working together. The former even makes up with the latter’s superior officer who foisted him off on her. I suspect that the makers of this movie had a followup series in mind. It didn’t happen, but it could have.
C. M. CHAN “The Dressing Table Murder.†Novelette. Jack Gibbons & Phillip Bethancourt #1. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1994. Reprinted in Murder Most Cozy: Mysteries in the Classic Tradition, edited by Cynthia Manson (Signet, paperback, January 1993. Also available individually on Amazon Kindle. June 2016.
Jack Gibbons is a Detective Sergeant based in Scotland Yard, while his close friend Phillip Bethancourt is the brilliant idle rich amateur who is allowed to follow along on his difficult cases as someone to bounce theories off of. Well, it’s actually more than that. It’s Bethancourt who is the more likely to come up with the theories and insight that Gibbons finds he does not always have on his own. The former is more likely to let the latter do all of the footwork.
In “The Dressing Table Murder,†their first recorded case together, a woman has been found dead in front of her bedroom mirror, killed by an instantaneously acting poison while putting her makeup on for the day . The reason I’ve called this a locked room mystery is that there is no food or drink in the room with her that contains any poison. The only other person in the house is the maid, who was in sight of the front door at all times, and the back door of the house is locked.
The two detectives do not spend a lot of time working on this aspect of the case, however. Most of their investigation is spent on confirming alibis of the various members of her immediate family – it seems unlikely she would allow anyone else to get close to her at her dressing table – and their finances, or the lack of them. Only after exhausting all of the possible lead sin this direction do they get back to the “how†of the matter, which is neatly done — but largely by a modest amount of misdirection by the author.
The two detectives do make for a most congenial pair, and their first case together is smoothly told. This was the first of twelve short works they shared detective duties on, all appearing in AHMM up through the May 2002 issue. A few years later they started to appear together again in paperback novels, four in all, beginning with The Young Widow in 2005, all under the author’s full name, Cassandra Chan.
HAKE TALBOT – Rim of the Pit. Rogan Kincaid #2. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1944. Dell #17, paperback, 1947. Bantam, paperback, 1965. IPL, paperback, November 1985. Ramble House, softcover, 2009. Reprinted in (probably) abridged form in Thrilling Mystery Novel, November 1945.
Hake Talbot’s Rim of the Pit has something of a reputation among Golden Age mysteries, and I’m still trying to figure out why. I read it back in High School because it looked spooky, but even then I found it forgettable. So much so that I forgot it was forgettable and re-read it last week.
It’s one of those things where a rather mundane murderer tries to dress up his quotidian crimes to make it look the work of some occult agent – in this case a northwoods goblin called the Windigo. Talbot trots out a seance, a vengeful ghost, voices in the night and a swooping soul-snatching demon, all to surprisingly little effect.
This sort of thing needs the creepy touch of someone like A. Merritt to evoke the authentic shudder, but all Talbot got from me was a sigh of impatience as characters kept running from room to room, then sitting down for entangled explanations of what they just saw.
And I mean, you need a native to get through some of those passes. By the time we got to the final, no-kidding-this-is-the-real-solution scene. I really didn’t care whodunit, and the only thing I’ll probably remember from all this is the author’s oft-spoken fetish for pink silk panties.
— Reprinted from The Hound of Dr. Johnson 53, September 2007.
G. K. CHESTERTON. The Innocence of Father Brown. Cassell, UK, hardcover, 1911. Lane, US, hardcover, 1911. Many reprint editions exist.
   A cornerstone volume, Chesterton’s Innocence of Father Brown can lay claim to greatness on two counts: It introduced the priest detective whose adventures are still popular three-quarters of a century later, and it contains more classic short stories than almost any other mystery collection before or since.
   All twelve of its stories deserve special mention. The opening story, “The Blue Cross,” long an anthology and textbook favorite, tells of the first meeting of Father Brown and the master thief Flambeau, who would later become his friend and associate on many cases. “The Secret Garden” has a dual impossibility – the appearance of a beheaded corpse inside a locked and guarded garden, and the disappearance of another man from the same garden. “The Queer Feet” turns upon a brilliant bit of psychology and is a favorite of several critics.
   “The Flying Star†involves a diamond theft at a Christmas party, and is Flambcau’s last crime. “The Invisible Man” is probably the most famous Father Brown story of all — so famous, in fact, that its solution is known to people who have never read it. Whether Smythe really could have been murdered in his guarded apartment building without anyone seeing the killer is a matter of some dispute, but the story is memorable nonetheless.
  “The Honour of Israel Gow” presents Father Brown with a number of bizarre objects, seemingly unrelated, The solution, simple yet startling, reveals a strange sort of honesty rather than a crime. In “The Wrong Shape” a man is stabbed to death with a curved dagger in a locked room. leaving an oddly shaped suicide note. “The Sins of Prince Saradine†is about a murder plot and a duel with rapiers. “The Hammer of God,” one of the three or four best Father Brown stories, combines a seemingly superhuman murder beside a great Gothic church with a solution that is simple and sa1isfying.
   “The Eye of Apollo” deals with a cult of sun worshipers and a unique murder method. “The Sign of the Broken Sword,” perhaps the cleverest and most enjoyable story in the volume, full of paradox and allowing Father Brown to practice some pseudo-historical detection, offers Chesterton’s dazzling answer to the question “Where would a wise man hide a body?” The final story, “The Three Tools of Death,” is about an apparently brutal murder.
   All twelve. offer a nice feeling of life in Edwardian England, and if Father Brown lacks the colorful eccentricities of Sherlock Holmes, if his solutions are often more intuition than deduction, this book is still a masterpiece, the single volume by which G .K. Chesterton is most likely to be remembered.
ISAAC ASIMOV “All in the Way You Read It.†Black Widowers #13. Short story. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1974. Collected in More Tales of the Black Widowers (Doubleday, hardcover, 1976) and in The Best Mysteries of Isaac Asimov (Doubleday, hardcover, 1986) as “The Three Numbers.â€
The Black Widowers were a dinner club of six members based in Manhattan who met once a month for a meal and discussion, invariably centered about the solution to a puzzle presented to them by a guest brought by one of the members. The pre-dinner discussion in “All in the Way You Read It†is about the strangeness of the English language; the problem to be tackled always comes after dinner.
To illustrate the former first, consider the word “unionized.†A labor leader might reasonably read this as “union-ized,†while a physicist might see it as “un-ionized.†And just for fun, here’s another: what common word in the English language changes its pronunciation when its first letter is changed to a capital letter?
The answer comes into play when after the evening meal, that night’s guest brings up the question he has brought. He is trying to open a safe for which he has copied the combination on a piece of paper. He has written it by hand, and it looks like this:
I’m not sure if this one’s easy, or it’s a stumper, but with all of the misdirection provided, I didn’t get it. Either way, one of the amusements of these stories, and Asimov wrote quite a few of them, is that it is invariably Henry, the waiter that serves them, who comes up with the solution. Which he does in this one, too. Nothing noir or hard-boiled about this one!
FASHION MODEL. Monogram Pictures, 1945. Robert Lowery, Marjorie Weaver, Tim Ryan, Lorna Gray, Dorothy Christy, Dewey Robinson, Sally Yarnell, Jack Norton, Harry Depp, Nell Craig. Director: William Beaudine.
With the title it has, you’d hardly expect a film called Fashion Model to be a murder mystery, but no kidding, that’s exactly what this movie is. And quite an enjoyable one it is, too. It takes place in a high class dress salon, and the object of interest is a valuable diamond brooch. Suspected is the stock boy, a young man played quite effectively by Robert Lowery, and his girl friend, one of the models, played even more effectively by Marjorie Weaver.
Both of the two leading actors display a flair for comedy as well, and truth be told, there is more comedy in this movie than there is mystery, a screwball affair that I found entertaining from beginning to end. Marjorie Weaver was a vivacious brunette who never quite made it out of B-movie fare such as this (Charlie Chan, Michael Shayne, etc.), and unfortunately her career pretty much ended with this film.
Of special note, perhaps, one of the cops on the case (Dewey Robinson as an a second-in-command to Tim Ryan) displays an IQ of about 80, tops. I think 1945 was about the end of the line for such embarrassments to police forces all across the country, wasn’t it?
MICHAEL Z. LEWIN – Missing Woman. Albert Samson #6. Alfed A. Knopf, hardcover, 1981. Berkley, paperback, 1982. Perennial Library, paperback, 984.
There are a number of op-notch candidates for the best private eye series going today. On the top of a good many lists would be Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books, but fans of the more traditional PI yarn would probably go more for the likes of Bill Pronzini’s nameless detective or Arthur Lyons’ Jacob Asch books.
Sometimes lost and passed over in the shouting is Albert Samson, billed at one time as “the cheapest detective in Indianapolis.†He’s undoubtedly still cheap. At the beginning of this book he is definitely broke, and about to be evicted from his office as patr of a big, downtown redevelopment project.
Which is not to say he’s not honest, dependable, and next to impossible to pry loose from a case. Even if he sounds a bit sour on his life (not on life, just his), his sense of humor never leaves him. Mostly it’s of a subtle variety, but not always, especially when he’s irritated. His relationship with Lt. Powder of Missing Persons does seem to be improving, however.
Luckily so, for, as you’ve already gathered from the title, that’s the kind of case that this latest one is. Samson jumps in with no abandon, treating it as the intellectual challenge it is, when suddenly he’s caught up with the abrupt realization that Murder Is Not a Game.
Detective stories do tend to tread a thin line between reality and fantasy. Michael Lewin’s big achievement here may very well be that he manages to give us the best of both.
Rating: A
–Very slightly revised from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 5, No. 6, Nov/Dec 1981.
