A LOVELY WAY TO DIE. Universal Pictures, 1968. Kirk Douglas, Sylvia Koscina, Eli Wallach, Kenneth Haigh, Sharon Farrell, Ralph Waite. Screenplay by A. J. Russell. Directed by David Lowell Rich. Currently available on YouTube.

   I confess I like this slightly smarmy, somewhat generic private eye tale more than it has any right to be liked.

   I hadn’t seen it since the mid-eighties, and then on television with commercials, so it was a pleasant surprise to find it on YouTube and discover it was pretty much the film I remembered, with all the caveats above including a few new ones about how quickly it veers from near comedy to melodrama like a leaf in the wind.

   Kirk Douglas is Jameson “Skye” Schuyler, a New York City cop who as the film opens resigns from the force after busting one too many heads. Schuyler is that staple of the movies, the tough cop whose methods are too direct for his own good.

   He’s no Dirty Harry or Popeye Doyle. He’s about as generic tough guy cop fed up with bureaucracy as you can imagine. That’s okay because it only takes up about three minutes of plot time anyway.

   He’s also a womanizer and a bit of a rat as the opening scene demonstrates, but this isn’t film noir by any stretch. His playboy lifestyle is played strictly for comedy up to the point he spots some made men in a bar and busts heads.

   To be honest I don’t think anyone involved with this other than Douglas or Wallach would know film noir if it bit them.

   No sooner is Douglas out of a job than he gets a call from Tennessee Fredericks (Eli Wallach), a smooth talking Southern Fried criminal defense lawyer who never lost a case and isn’t planning on doing so with his latest client, Rena Westabrook (Sylvia Koscina), whose husband took a bullet in their pool after they argued while she was out on the town with playboy Jonathan Fleming (Kenneth Haigh).

   Now Rena and Fleming are about to go on trial for murder and Fredericks wants Schuyler to baby sit her on her estate, keep Fleming away, and do a little private investigating into anything Fredericks can use, including the only witness he has, local tree trimmer Sean Maguire (Ralph Waite) who saw the couple outside a local bar when the murder happened.

   It’s pleasant work, pleasant wages, and pleasant scenery in the person of Rena and her maid (Sharon Farrell) who liked to wear her clothes and flirt with her husband. Farrell has nothing to do, but she fills out a maid’s uniform nicely.

   Rena is a bit of a kook, honest to a fault that she married her husband for his money and didn’t love him or even like him. Her nickname is Gypsy, and it fit her even if her in-laws meant it as an insult. She wears it as a badge of honor.

   And Fredericks is too slick by half: “Would you trust someone who hadn’t been south of Mason-Dixon since he was eight and talks with that accent?” Schuyler asks him.

   Things start going wrong almost as soon as Schuyler moves in. It’s hard to keep Fleming away and Rena doesn’t cooperate much. Then Maguire disappears, their only collaborating witness, and there is something going on at the neighboring mansion of a reclusive Englishman that has men with guns hanging around and a body in a freezer.

   Still, even with all that going on Schuyler and Rena start to flirt and play at the edges of things.

         Rena: You’re really a terrible man, did you know that?

         Schuyler: You’ve got some admirable qualities yourself.

   You know they are going to end up horizontal, and true to the somewhat bi polar nature of the film there is a funny morning after scene when Schuyler does the walk of shame back to his room barefoot past the staff.

   As the trial goes on there is an attempt to kill Schuyler, then a body shows up and the police want to question him, but slowly he starts to put the pieces together, and finds a tie other than Rena and Fleming between her husband and the tree trimmer. Meanwhile Rena is lying about Fleming and sneaking out to see him. Did she murder her husband after all?

   The film is pretty to look at. New York seldom looked prettier outside of one of those glamorous Doris Day pictures from a decade before, though the sets are pretty generic. Douglas seems to be having fun in a much lighter mode than usual, and Koscina in a series of bikinis, sleek outfits, and negligees is more than worth looking at in widescreen technicolor as well as good on screen.

   She seldom got to act in American films, but she was certainly worth watching.

   Basically this is the film equivalent of a Frank Kane Johnny Liddell book or a lesser Peter Chambers novel by Henry Kane. There’s nothing special, but the mystery isn’t bad, there’s some action, only one really big slap up the head moment I won’t give away, pretty girls in various states of undress, and big name stars like Douglas and Wallach having fun without phoning it in.

   In the years since I first saw this in the theater it still holds up for me. I will not be shocked if it doesn’t for you. It’s not any kind of a classic, not special in any way, not overly witty, or exceptionally well directed or photographed (some of it looks like it was made for television as too many films of that era do).

   I just happen to like it, smarmy as it may be. It does its job for its running time, doesn’t embarrass itself, and says goodnight politely without leaving a bad taste, but I admit freely I might not like it half as well if I had first seen it at thirty and not eighteen.

   You might want to keep that last thought in mind if you seek it out.

LAWRENCE BLOCK – The Canceled Czech. Evan Tanner #2. Gold Medal d1747, paperback original; 1st printing, 1966. Reprint editions include: Jove, paperback, 1984; Otto Penzler Books, hardcover, 1994; Berkley, paperback, 1999; Harper, paperback, 2007.

   The underlying gimmick in Lawrence Block’s “Evan Tanner” books is that he is also known as The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, or the title of the first book in the series. I have misplaced my notes as to how he got the injury to his head that caused the problem, but the fact is that he cannot fall asleep. I don’t know if it’s possible in the real worlds, but he is up and awake 24 hours a day.

   Which as gimmicks go, it’s quite a good one, or it would be if it ever came into play as this particular book goes on, but it doesn’t. For reasons that were probably gone into a lot more thoroughly in the first book, the head of some very hush-hush organization thinks Tanner works for him. His assignment: help the last of the high echelon non-German Nazis escape from his prison in Czechoslovakia where he’s about to go on trial and be executed.

   Tanner wonders why. It seems that the US has been secretly monitoring all of Janos Kotacek’s communications with the outside world from his lair in Portugal, and they have decided it would be more useful to keep him alive than to have him dead. The job won’t be easy, but Tanner agrees to give it a try.

   When he gets to Czechoslovakia, however, he has no plan. He’s the kind of fellow who takes his opportunities wherever he can get them. And thus enter Greta, the daughter of the man, a devout follower of the imprisoned man, who agrees to help Tanner get Kotacek free. To that end, Greta, who is not as political as her father, is sent along with Tanner to aid and assist him as best she can.

   And what she really does best she does in bed. Both buxom and blonde, she is everything men in the 1960s dreamed of in a woman – a nymphomaniac. Sometimes, Tanner realizes, it is better not to have a plan. Greta’s proclivities in this regard, as it so happens, is exactly what he needs to pull off the most wild and woolly escape possible.

   The story is basically serious, but Block tells with such a light touch that the pages fly by. Once the escape has taken place, though, and Greta is no longer needed, she disappears from the story completely, never to return, and it’s quite a slog to get Kotacek back to his home is Lisbon. I’m deliberately leaving out all of the details of both the first and second halves of the story, but I would like to say the first half is by far the better one.

From Kenneth R. Johnson:

   I am hoping to repost my on-line reference book, The Digest Index, this year; to that end I am trying to tie up some loose ends. One minor quandary concerns a short-lived digest imprint called Pennant Mystery. I have one volume, The Six Iron Spiders by Phoebe Atwood Taylor. The back cover ad lists itself and three other titles:

      Death out of Thin Air by Stuart Towne
      So Much Blood by Bruno Fischer
      The Purple Parrot by Clyde B. Clason

   I have been absolutely unable to confirm the existence of these three other titles from any secondary sources. They are not listed in the World Catalog or the National Union Catalog. There are no known cover reproductions anywhere and I have not seen any of them offered for sale in the 14 years since I first posted The Digest Index. I am beginning to suspect that these are phantoms, advertised but never actually published.

   Does anyone out there actually have one of these, or at least have seen one on the hoof?

   Several months ago I wrote a column discussing some of the pre-World War II Inspector Schmidt novels written by Aaron Marc Stein under the byline of George Bagby. The last of these, which I don’t have and for that reason didn’t discuss, was MURDER CALLING “50″ (1942). Aaron spent the years after Pearl Harbor first in the Office of War Information, then in the Army where he served as a cryptographer. His military specialty plays a large role in the first postwar Bagby novel.

   DEAD ON ARRIVAL (1946) was published five or six months after the end of the war but is set and may have been written in its early years, with references to blackouts and the rubber shortage and all the male characters of military age waiting to be called into the service. For a novel the unities of time and place are extreme, with the action covering about twelve hours—between late on a Sunday afternoon in 1942 or ‘43 and before dawn the next morning—and mainly confined to a single building, an old brownstone worthy of Charles Addams in Manhattan’s East Fifties, occupied by a hyper-eccentric old cripple and his two all-but-deaf servants, who happen to be judo experts, with a female antique dealer and a young engineer living in the house next door.

   Schmitty and Bagby happen to be in Bellevue Hospital on business when a hysterical Western Union messenger boy is admitted, claiming he found a dead body in the house where he delivered a telegram. This makes Schmidt the first cop to arrive on the scene, and the crime quickly proves bizarre enough: a corpse with a broken neck and a pair of panties found inside his suit who is soon identified as the only living relative of the house’s owner, a wheelchair-bound old man with a long long beard in which he keeps various objects like chessmen.

   The panties prove to belong to the antique dealer next door, and both she and the young engineer living in the same building turn out to have a habit of visiting the house where the murder happened by climbing from the fire-escape balcony of the one brownstone onto that of the other. Before the end of the book’s twelve-hour time span there are three more murders.

   The synthetic rubber process that ultimately motivated the killings isn’t even mentioned till the seventh of the book’s ten chapters, and the cast is so small that the Least Likely Suspect is rather easy to spot even though Bagby can hardly be said to play fair with the reader. The long message in cipher which Schmidt discovers during the night leads to a fascinating lesson in cryptography even though it implausibly requires both Bagby and the guy who fashioned the message to be experts in that arcane science. Aaron’s addiction to super-lengthy sentences remains intact from the pre-war years, as witness this one example among many.

   
   These literary Dagwood sandwiches may not be to everyone’s taste but they’re okay by me and were also acceptable to Anthony Boucher, whose review for the San Francisco Chronicle (10 February 1946) simply capsulized the plot and welcomed Schmitty back into action “with a huzzah.” As who didn’t?

   Tony was especially fond of those whodunits that offered what he called a dividend, by which he meant a trove of reliable information on some off-trail subject. In DEAD ON ARRIVAL the subject was cryptography but the dividend had little to do with the plot. In the next Bagby novel the integration between those elements is near perfect. THE ORIGINAL CARCASE (1946) shares with its predecessor a very tight time frame, with events kicking off on the evening of Wednesday, September 4, about a year after the end of the war, and winding up less than 24 hours later.

   As in DEAD ON ARRIVAL, Schmitty is the first cop on the scene. He’s in Bagby’s apartment—a building with twin towers in whose upper stories are units with terraces—when the two men hear a horrible scream coming from the only terrace apartment in the tower opposite Bagby’s that is ablaze with light. In a few minutes they’ve discovered the cause of the scream: a young bride and her husband, returning from their honeymoon, were greeted by the bride’s friends and relatives (not the groom’s) with a surprise party which was cut short when the bride opened the cupboard doors of one of the wedding presents, a 7-foot-long Sheraton mahogany sideboard, and found a dead body inside.

   No one can identify the strangled corpse but Schmitty soon begins to wonder whether the murder has any connection with the social backgrounds of the newlyweds, the bride coming from an upper-crust family and her husband the younger brother of a notorious Prohibition-era gangster who, in a time of severe housing shortage, secured the apartment for them. During the small hours, after the police have left and the unit is deserted, someone manages to sneak in and throw the sideboard off the terrace into the street, smashing it to smithereens.

   Later in the night comes, as usual in Bagby, a second murder, the victim this time being a key employee of the antique dealer who provided the sideboard. Tony Boucher’s description of the novel in the Chronicle (20 October 1946) was nothing short of ecstatic. “To the average reader a delightfully told story; to the mystery technician a model of precisely how to integrate a love motif, an absorbing dividend and a perfectly plotted problem.”

   Just as THE ORIGINAL CARCASE shows us that Aaron must have spent a good deal of his spare time prowling around antique shops, the next Bagby novel indicates that he was equally fond of sports events. THE TWIN KILLING (1947) opens on a steamy summer night with Schmitty investigating the barber-shop murder of a big-time gambler with a habit of getting himself shaved and spruced up in that shop after it was closed to the public.

   According to the evidence the Inspector painstakingly accumulates in the first and most interesting chapters, the murderer might have come straight out of an Ellery Queen novel. First he broke into the gambler’s apartment and stole his .45 and a pair of his shoes, then he bought a ticket at a flea-pit theater which was showing a war flick with lots of shooting, changed into the stolen shoes, left the theater by the balcony fire door, crossed over to the roof of the adjacent barber shop, shot the gambler with the .45 through the shop’s open skylight during the movie’s loudest combat scene, crossed back to the theater, changed back into his own shoes and split.

   It’s only after this reconstruction that baseball enters the picture in the form of the dead man’s connections with four players, two old hands at the game and a pair of promising rookies. Aaron never mentions the name of the team nor what stadium they play in, but Schmidt and Bagby while on the case get to attend three games, the last of which provides the setting for what is all but inevitable in a Stein novel, a second murder, with all the suspects from the first murder conveniently in the ballpark.

   I wouldn’t call this one fair to the reader, but the baseball environment and players are vividly rendered—thanks perhaps to iconic sportscaster Red Barber, to whom the book is dedicated—and all in all Tony Boucher’s comment in the Chronicle (6 April 1947) can’t be improved on: “A trifle loose in solution but as fresh, lively and agreeable a sports whodunit as has turned up in years.”

HARRY CREWS – The Gospel Singer. William Morrow, hardcover, 1968. Dell, paperback, 1969. Reprinted many times since.

   The Gospel Singer’s about a gospel singer. We never learn his name. He’s just “The Gospel Singer.”

   Born to a family of pig farmers in Enigma, Georgia, he’s much prettier than the rest of the family (couldn’t be any uglier). He’s much prettier than the rest of the town.

   Then at the age of 11, as his voice chords mature, his gift is exposed.

   He has a transcendent, melodious, otherworldly, sonorous singing voice. And when he sings the gospels, all the ladies turn to jelly, and all the men fall to their knees begging forgiveness for their sins.

   The thing is, though, the Gospel Singer’s not particularly religious. He’s not against it or anything. It’s just not his bag.

   His bag? Gettin’ laid.

   And my golly, this gospel singin’ is the ticket, for God’s sakes.

   When he sings that old time gospel music, He sings that old time gospel music. All the sweet silken virgins slither at His feet. They succumb to His will. They will do as He pleases. And it pleases him (if not Him). Quite a bit.

   It’s all going well as long as no one finds out about it.

   But MaryBell screws up the whole works.

   MaryBell is his boyhood sweetheart. Everyone in town is in love with darling MaryBell. But she belongs to the Gospel Singer. Everybody knows it.

   MaryBell is as pure as satin sheets on a bed of fresh snow.

   But when she hears the Gospel Singer sing, her clothes fly off faster than white on rice.

   She naturally assumes that they’ll get married.

   But the Gospel Singer ain’t too interested in settling down at the moment.

   MaryBell gets pretty upset about losing her virginity without proper consideration.

   So she hatches vengeance for her scorn.

   She builds a church in the Black part of town. The Church of the Gospel Singer. And there’s no pictures of Christ anywhere. Just pictures of the Gospel Singer.

   And she organizes it and ordains a preacher, a reformed, born again, badass: Willalee Bookatee Hull.

   And then as soon as the Church of the Gospel Singer is up and running, she tries to seduce Willalee.

   When Willalee refuses to sin, “She say, you saved on a lie, the church a lie, the Gospel Singer a lie. She say, God is a man with his pants down, God is a unbuttoned fly. She say, the Gospel Singer …. and I git her with the ice pick. I taken her by the throat and hit her and hit her and hit her.”

   So now MaryBell’s dead, Willalee is gonna be lynched not for murdering MaryBell, but for raping her. For deflowering the flower of Enigma. A crime of which he is innocent.

   It’s up to the Gospel Singer to set things right.

   And if you believe that, then you’re confusing Harry Crews with Flannery O’Connor.

   Not only aren’t things put right.

   The whole thing is going straight to hell.