VICTOR METHOS – A Killer’s Wife. Jessica Yardley #1. Thomas & Mercer, hardcover, March 2020. Setting: Contemporary Utah.

First Sentence: Jordan Russo swung the passenger door open and leapt from the moving car.

   Some time ago, I gave up writing negative reviews of books as it was just too frustrating. But now and then, there is a book that really needs to be addressed.

   I have read two of Victor Methos’ standalone legal mysteries and loved them. In fact, I started to bore people by talking about and recommending them. Therefore, writing this is painful in the extreme.

   My first issue was the constant referral of the protagonist by her surname. I recognize there are some professions where that is common, regardless of gender. However, a friend and I, who share the same first name, are the only ones I’ve known to do this is real life. Even Donna Leon makes the distinction of referring to her character as “Brunetti” when he is at work, and “Guido” when he’s at home.

   Second, the troubled, incredibly bright teen-aged daughter. What kind of mother would hold her child back from being able to realize her full potential? Red flags immediately were raised as to the purpose of this.

   Third, when the police, who were comically incompetent, and who had already withheld information from her, came and asked for attorney Jessica Yardley’s help with her serial-killer ex-husband, any sane, reasonable person who had been through such an experience, would have told them to do their own damn jobs and get out. Instead – I know it was the basis for the plot – she agrees. Then, when they tell her not to enter the crime scene, she does the classic TSTL move and enters the crime scene. Jessica, for someone who was supposed to be so incredibly successful prosecutor, was painfully dumb.

   Fourth, the too-good-to-be-true boyfriend. Red flags screamed at that.

   About one-quarter into the book, there was no question where the plot was going, and it isn’t that long of a book. The end was so clearly broadcast that I broke my cardinal rule and went to the end of the book, only to find I was 100%, bang-on correct.

   The only parts of the book that were well done and rang true were the courtroom scenes. Due to Methos’ experience as a lawyer, the courtroom scenes are interesting, engrossing, and suspenseful on their own merit. Too bad the rest of the book didn’t hold up as well.

   A Killer’s Wife was an absolute wall-banger for me. Even more frustrating was that I couldn’t actually, physically throw it across the room because it was an e-galley and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my Kindle. I’m not completely giving up on Mr. Methos. I’d be happy to read another of his standalone legal thrillers which, I repeat, I found to be excellent, but I shall stay away from his dysfunctional female protagonists

Rating: NR (Not Recommended).

JIMMY SANGSTER – Touchfeather. Triton Books, UK, hardcover, 1968. W. W. Norton, US, hardcover, 1968. Berkley S1789, US, paperback, 1970. Brash Books, US, paperback, 2018.

   Despite that rather jaunty foreword by screenwriter and novelist Jimmy Sangster to his first of two novels featuring air hostess Katy Touchfeather, British agent in the mysterious Mr. Blaser’s department, the books are both far better and tougher than they sound or than the paperback covers made out.

   Sangster’s name is no doubt familiar to most readers of the blog as the man behind many of the classic line of films coming out of Hammer Studios. His credits include The Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, Jack the Ripper, Brides of Dracula, The Mummy, The Hellfire Club, and Deadlier Than the Male. In addition he penned two spy novels about Katy Touchfeather and two about down trodden ex-agent turned spy John Smith (one of which was filmed with Robert Horton as Smith).

   Before going further we might as well deal with the elephant in the room. The two Touchfeather books are inherently sexist as only late Sixties spy fiction could be. In an age well before the term Flight Attendant was coined and still well within the era of books and films like Coffee Tea and Me, the stewardess or air hostess, as the British called them. was a staple fantasy figure. That they also represented a rare opportunity for young women to have a rewarding career and adventure was often lost in a fantasy of airlines as Playboy Clubs in the sky for pilots and traveling businessmen, something not lost to Sangster in his introduction.

   As someone who traveled widely and often in that era, I would like to point out that simply was not the case, certainly in the Seventies when international flights included the danger of hi-jacking. Flight Attendants then and now had tough demanding jobs that required quite a bit more than looking good in a short skirt and tight blouse.

   But that image was often encouraged by the airlines and popular media in an age when flying was still rather exotic and women were still considered chiefly interested in finding husbands.

   Despite her jaunty suggestive name Katy Touchfeather is anything but a flying Bunny.

   Blaser, “he thinks of me as a Fred. But then I suppose he’s on the right track; if he thought of me as a Katy, he’d never ask me to do some of the extraordinary things he does …” is C. W. Blaser, CBE and used to be something in the Royal Navy, but now he runs one of those departments in the intelligence service no one likes to mention or admit exists.

   After her husband, who worked for Blaser, was assassinated, Katy found herself recruited and ended up a sort of freelance air hostess flying whatever route and airline Blaser needed her on as a roving agent of the most secret kind. A sort of Our Girl Any Where We Need Her.

   This time out Gerastan Industries is in aviation and have a small key research unit in England they would like to move to the United States. Now a corpse has been found in Bombay (this was well before anyone outside of India called it Mumbai) with information on his body that came from that research unit. The effluence has hit the fan and Professor Partman who runs that research unit has booked a flight for Bombay.

   Katy has to cut short her leave and be the hostess on that flight posing as an Indian air hostess.

   It’s not an unpleasant assignment either as Professor Partman, Bill, as she is soon calling him, looks like a cross between Prince Philip and Gregory Peck. Things are going swimmingly until a second flight to Rome is hi-jacked and two American air pirates kidnap Bill to Egypt.

   Then Katy gets kidnapped and tortured by the same two American hoods because Bill might have given her something and the action really starts to move, leading Katy to the heart of the matter, Roger Gerastan, “… he had the lightest blue eyes I had ever seen, like pieces of chipped ice… the eyes that both fascinated and repelled at the same time; they had a near-hypnotic quality which made one forget that the man behind them was only five feet eight inches tall, and not at all attractive.”

   Touchfeather moves, and not just in terms of plot. Rather like its heroine’s cover, the plot finds Katy crisscrossing the ocean and in constant movement until she follows the plot to its surprisingly tough minded conclusion, when we get a real glimpse of the steel beneath Katy Touchfeather’s tough facade (There had been no alternative, I’m afraid, and it is something I shall regret to the day I die.).

   Not a great spy novel by any means, but much better than the general line of Bondian imitations of the period with Sangster and Katy Touchfeather good company, and ultimately far less the kind of sexy romp readers might have expected and far more a well written exercise in intrigue, adventure, and suspense — with more than enough sexy romp for lovers of that sort of thing.

   Sadly there was only one other adventure for Katy, Touchfeather Too, but the two books do make a nice set, well enough, and cleverly enough, written that their heroine becomes much more than what seemingly meets the eye, attractive as that may be. It wouldn’t take all that much to retool Katy for today, which is more that could be said of some of her male counterparts, and by the time you reach the end of the book you’ll likely agree she is as smart, independent, and tough as any agent you’ve met in the pages of fiction, then or now.

BOILING POINT. Warner Brothers, 1993. Wesley Snipes, Dennis Hopper, Lolita Davidovich, Viggo Mortensen, Seymour Cassel, Jonathan Banks, Dan Hedaya. Screenplay: James B. Harris, based on the novel Money Men by Gerald Petievich. Director: James B. Harris. Currently streaming on Starz & Amazon Prime.

   The first thing you should know about Boiling Point is that it was written and directed by veteran Hollywood producer James B. Harris, who is still perhaps best known in some circles for producing Stanley Kubrick’s iconic noir film The Killing (1956). I say that’s the first thing you should know because, in many ways, Boiling Point is a 1950s film noir embellished in bright neon 1990s colors. It’s got a lean screenplay, a coterie of great character actors, a seedy Hollywood setting, and a plot that features a cop and a criminal both involved with the same call girl.

   Based on the book Money Men by Gerald Petievich (whose novel To Live and Die in L.A. was brought to the big screen by William Friedkin), the film stars Wesley Snipes as Jimmy Mercer, a tired and jaded Secret Service Agent obsessed with tracking down the man who killed one of his colleagues. Snipes is an actor that I like very much, but his performance here is neither exceptional nor mediocre. It’s just solid. Nothing more, nothing less. Dan Hedaya, one of the most familiar faces for those immersed in 1990s film and television, portrays Mercer’s partner. He’s good here. As he always is.

   The real star of the movie is Dennis Hopper who really sinks his teeth into the role. He portrays Red Diamond, a perpetual loser and down on his luck criminal always developing his next scheme. Released from prison and in debt to a mafia sort, Diamond teams up with the amoral enforcer Ronnie (Viggo Mortensen) to get into the “paper” (counterfeit dollars) game. There’s a bunch of subplots, all involving various criminal sorts. These include the old timer Virgil Leach (played to the hilt by Seymour Cassell); crooked lawyer Max Waxman (a perfectly cast Jonathan Banks); and a bag man (Paul Gleason) who conducts his dirty deals in a parking lot. Diamond, who has a special fondness for big band music, also begins an affair of sorts call girl Vikki Dunbar (Lolita Davidovich).

   As it turns out, Jimmy Mercer – now estranged from his wife – is in love with Vikki. Unfortunately, the woman that ties these two men together is not a well-developed character. In addition, the film never really explores this ill-fated love triangle aside from showing us that it exists. Part of this, I suppose, is due to the relative short running time (92 minutes).

   I don’t know that there’s too much more than I can say about this film other than that it exudes atmosphere and never condescends to the audience. It’s a solid crime film. One that, with a few changes here and there, could just have easily been a moderately successful 82 minute black and white Columbia Pictures film from the 1950s.

   
   I had already decided that the subject of this column would be Erle Stanley Gardner when I learned about the new incarnation of Perry Mason in an 8-part mini-series on HBO. I don’t have cable or satellite but from conversations with a few friends who do, plus the write-up in the New York Times and in the June/July issue of the AARP magazine, I get the distinct impression that poor old ESG is whirling in his grave.

   It’s the early 1930s and Mason (Matthew Rhys) is a World War I veteran, an alcoholic, and suffering from what we now call PTSD. He’s not (or at least not yet) a lawyer but a sleazy private eye working for and studying law under an established criminal attorney. In effect he’s morphed into a squalid avatar of Paul Drake. When his mentor dies just before he’s to try a big murder case, Mason completes his apprenticeship, sits for and passes the bar, and takes over the defense.

   Sound crazy? But the premise does touch base with Gardner more than you might think. ESG never went to law school but apprenticed himself until he felt he was ready to take the bar. The new Mason’s mentor (John Lithgow) is named E.B. Jonathan, which is precisely the name of the crusty and ethically challenged lawyer who served as mentor to Pete Wennick in a short-lived series Gardner wrote for Black Mask in the late Thirties.

   The portrait of Mason’s city seems to come straight out of the city, modeled on Poisonville in Hammett’s RED HARVEST, where Ken Corning practiced in another of Gardner’s Black Mask series: crooked cops, corrupt pols, the whole nine yards. Perhaps I’ll catch up with this version of Mason someday.

   Gardner and I go back a long way. I discovered him in my teens, and over the generations I’ve read all of the Mason novels, some of them three or four times, and most of the A.A. Fairs, very few of them more than once. Not re-reading the exploits of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, at least the early ones, may have been a mistake. Last year I discussed THE BIGGER THEY COME (1939), with which the long-running series kicked off, and THE KNIFE SLIPPED, which was probably also written in 1939 but didn’t get published until just a few years ago.

   In TURN ON THE HEAT (1940), which until recently was considered second in the series, we learn what we would have learned from THE KNIFE SLIPPED had it not been rejected 80-odd years ago: that Donald was not just suspended for a year from the California bar for dreaming up a legal way to commit murder, as he’d told Bertha in THE BIGGER THEY COME, but permanently kicked out of the profession.

   In any event he’s working for Cool as a PI but not yet her partner when the firm is hired by a man calling himself Smith. The job is to locate a young doctor’s wife who, after the failure of her marriage, had vanished almost twenty years earlier (meaning soon after the end of World War I) from the then thriving small town of Oakview, several hours’ drive from LA.

   The young doctor had also vanished, apparently along with his attractive nurse, but Smith insists he has no interest in either of them. Donald drives to Oakview to research public records and the back files of the local newspaper, where he learns from the editor’s niece, a bright young lady desperate to leave the now dying town, that he’s the third person to be hunting for information on the vanished couple.

   At the end of his first day on the job he’s given a black eye and run out of town by a tough guy who might be a cop. Undeterred, Donald soon learns that the elusive doctor has changed his name and set up practice in thriving Santa Carlotta, which is much closer to LA and seems to be Gardner’s name for Santa Barbara. A few days later a telegram from the Oakview editor’s niece tells him that the doctor’s wife has come back and, posing as a reporter for the paper, he revisits the town to interview the now middle-aged woman.

   Another lead takes him to the second of his two predecessors on the trail of the doctor’s wife. Soon he reaches the core of the mystery: the doctor is now running for mayor of Santa Carlotta and the corrupt politicos in office are trying to create a scandal around him. Eventually there’s a murder, and it seems that, like so many characters in Perry Mason novels, both the medico and the ambitious newspaper gal discovered the body and kept mum about it. As Mason would have done but without benefit of legal gimmicks, Donald sets out to clear the innocent.

   Considering the family resemblances between Gardner and Fair novels, it’s amazing that it took years before the two authors were recognized as one. As in so many Mason cases, a few questions remain unanswered at the end of GOLD COMES IN BRICKS. How did the bent cop Harbet learn of Donald’s involvement so quickly? Why was the photograph of a character who never appears in the book removed from the dead woman’s apartment? But Gardner keeps things moving at warp speed, creates a network of deceptions within deceptions (including a couple of scenes where Donald scams Bertha), and even offers a dollop of fair-play detection. If you wonder why some readers prefer the C&Ls over the Perry Masons, read this novel.

   GOLD COMES IN BRICKS (1940) resembles the earlier C&Ls in that the murder is a relatively trivial event buried under a mountain of scams. Passing himself off as, of all things, a physical fitness instructor, Donald enters the household of prosperous businessman Henry Ashbury, who’s hired the firm to investigate a pair of $10,000 checks to cash recently signed by his daughter Alta, and quickly learns that her father’s suspicions are on the mark: she’s been paying gambler Jed Ringold to get back some stolen love letters written to her by a married man about to go on trial for the murder of his wife—letters which the man’s sleazy defense attorney is desperate not to let fall into the hands of the prosecution.

   All hell breaks loose when Ringold is shot to death in his hotel room a few minutes after being given a third check by Alta. Donald, spying on the situation from the room next door, takes the check out of Ringold’s pocket before slipping away. For a few chapters his maneuvers to protect himself and Alta and confuse the witnesses who saw him on the scene take a back seat as he heads for northern California to look into a scheme to sell stock in a gold-dredging venture and, with the help of a tough old prospector who might be a Gardner self-portrait, launches a plot to scam the scammers.

   The frantic pace and abundant insights into securities fraud and gold-claim salting hold our attention despite having little to do with the murder. Donald falls in love as usual but this time does not get beaten up. As customary in these early outings, it’s his show all the way. Bertha curses and grouses about money but doesn’t contribute a great deal. So much for the claim that the C&Ls are variations on what Rex Stout had initiated five years before THE BIGGER THEY COME. Perhaps Donald is a bit like Archie Goodwin (although he could never take orders or narrate as engagingly as Archie does), but at the thought of Bertha as another Nero Wolfe, the mind turns cartwheels.

You all know that rule about “I before E except after C”? It’s now been revoked.

PAUL KRUGER – Weave a Wicked Web. Phil Kramer #2. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1967. Paperback Library 63-180, paperback; 1st printing, December 1969.

   There’s a little reviewer’s license going on there in the line up above. Phil Kramer’s not a licensed PI. What he is instead is a practicing attorney, but what he’s hired to do in this, his second appearance, is definitely a PI’s job, and the way he tackles it is exactly how a PI would. A PI in other colors is still a PI, no matter how you may look at it. Or him, as the shoe may fit.

   It all begins when a beautiful blonde walks into his office to have a woman called Kitty Bates found. She also has a description of her, but nothing about her background or anything else. She also will not say why she wants her found. There’s not much for Kramer to go on, but when he sees a story in a newspaper about a woman’s otherwise unidentified body having been found, the wheels in the case finally get going.

   And what a case it is. It turns out that Kitty Bates – yes, it is she – has been blackmailing someone in his client’s family for a long time, and that possibly even before she was killed, someone else had impersonated her to obtain $50,000 in cash from someone else in the family. And then two, maybe three, other deaths occur, Kramer is knocked out from behind at least once, and all of the alibis of those who may have responsible are leaking like sieves.

   This, in other words, is a detective story with a capital D. Do not expect any more character development than there is in your average Perry Mason novel, for there is none. There are twists galore in the telling, culminating in a long scene at the end, over ten pages long, in which all of the suspects have been gathered together while Kramer explains all – naming two killers in succession before finally implicating the real one.

   All fine and good, but even if this sound fine and good to you (and I freely admit that some may not), the telling is awfully dry, with lots of repetition as Kramer continually goes over the facts with everyone he speaks to. It’s a good mystery, no doubt about it, but with only a minimum amount of  juice in it to speak of, it’s not a great one.

      The Phil Kramer series –

Weep for Willow Green. Simon 1966
Weave a Wicked Web. Simon 1967
If the Shroud Fits. Simon 1969
The Bronze Claws. Simon 1972
The Cold Ones. Simon 1972

   Besides her five Phil Kramer novels, “Paul Kruger,” a pen name of Roberta Elizabeth Sebenthall,   (1917-1979), has five other works of crime fiction included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.