FREDERICK C. DAVIS – Deep Lay the Dead. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942. Thriller Novel Classic #26, digest paperback, circa 1946.

   An extremely prolific contributor to the pulp magazines, where he published at least 1000 stories (among them dozens of the Operator #5 “hero pulp” adventures), Frederick C. Davis began publishing mystery novels in 1937. He produced close to forty books over the next four decades — sixteen under his own name, one as by Murdo Coombs (A Moment of Need, 1947), and the balance under the pseudonym Stephen Ransome.

   His fiction was among the most literate and entertaining of its day (if sometimes a little too casually paced), and stands up well to the test of time.

   Deep Lay the Dead is arguably his best novel. Ex-Dartmouth mathematics professor, cipher addict, and mountain climber Rigby Webb comes to an isolated corner of eastern Pennsylvania to confront a retired doctor named Chandler, whom he suspects of pulling strings to first get him fired from Dartmouth and to then keep him out of the army.

   His suspicions are accurate, but Chandler’s reasons are noble: He is working for the State Department and General Staff, attempting to design an “indecipherable cipher” so as to win supremacy over the Axis in signal communications. Getting Rig fired was the first of several tests of Chandler’s loyalty, all of which he has passed in admirable fashion.

   Rig agrees to work on the cipher project  with the doctor, but they don’t get very far with their collaborative efforts: One of the guests invited to Chandler’s country estate by his wife, Claire, is an enemy agent. Murder strikes, a howling blizzard renders the house party snowbound, and tensions escalate to a fever pitch as more violence erupts. Rig eventually unmasks the traitor and saves the day, and in so doing gets to use his mountain-climbing skills (but not in the way you might think).

   This is a tightly plotted, suspenseful novel built around a classic mystery situation. There is also some intriguing background information on codes and ciphers. (Another of· Davis’s strong suits was his ability to weave information on unusual and/or esoteric topics into his narratives.) Davis did have a tendency to truncate his action scenes, and the climax, while exciting, is much too abrupt; but the book’s strengths more than make up for this and a few other minor weaknesses.

   Davis created numerous series characters, for both his pulp stories and his novels. Professor Cyrus Hatch uses scientific methods and ratiocination to solve baffling crimes in several early novels, among them Coffins for Three (1938), Let the Skeletons Rattle (1944), and Thursday’s Blade (1947). And the semi-hard-boiled detective team of Schyler Cole and Luke Speare, who operate out of New York, is featured in such titles as The Deadly Miss Ashley (1950) and Drag the Dark (1953).

   Deep lay the Dead is the only non-series novel to appear under Davis’s own name; several others were published as by Stephen Ransome. Ten of his Operator #5 pulp novels were reprinted in the Sixties and Seventies under the house pen name of Curtis Steele; these carry such titles as The Invisible Empire and Blood Rein of the Dictator and provide plenty of campy fun.

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

JACK VANCE – The Palace of Love. Demon Princes #3. Serialized in Galaxy SF, December 1996 through February 1967. Berkley X1454, paperback, October 1967. Cover by Richard Powers. Daw UE1442, paperback, February 1979.

   Keith Gerson managed to obtain a fortune for use in his life’s single purpose – revenge against his parents’ murderer. The hunt for the third is this story. The trail of Violo Falushe leads him to a mad poet Navarth; Drusilla, his ward; and then to the notorious Palace of Love. Falushe is killed and the love of Drusilla turned down.

   The first installment [of the serial version] is the best; at the beginning, trips to far-flung planets are a necessary part of Gerson’s hunt and are reminiscent of Delany in descriptive wonder. As the search narrows down, so does the tale itself slow down, to the pace of the final walk to the palace. The symbolism of that place escapes me, but there must be something more to it other than boredom.

Rating: ***½

WATCHER. IFCMidnight, 2022. Maika Monroe as Julia, Karl Glusman as Francis, Burn Gorman as Daniel Weber, Madalina Anea as Irina. Director: Chloe Okuno.

   I’m glad I didn’t read anything about Watcher before I went to see it recently at an independent movie theater in North Hollywood. That is to say: I knew nothing beyond the basic premise: a woman has a watcher/stalker problem. It’s a plot as old as time, especially when it’s a young woman who moves into a new apartment. This is territory that has been fodder for countless thrillers and slashers, some memorable. Many decidedly not.

   Does Watcher have anything it in that sets it apart from the dozens of similar movies that have come before it? Before I can answer this question, I must point out that the film doesn’t necessarily break new ground and that it wears its myriad influences on its sleeve. There’s Hitchcock, of course. Particularly Rear Window (1954).

   There’s also Roman Polanski. I’ve seen one reviewer make references to both Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1967), but the film that came immediately to my mind was Polanski’s later thriller, Frantic (1988) in which Harrison Ford portrayed a doctor out of his element in Paris, searching for his missing wife. One salient aspect from that exceptionally well-crafted film that continues to stick in my mind is how Ford’s character finds the language barrier – he doesn’t speak French – to be a deeply threatening psychological barrier to his quest.

   That’s even more the case in Watcher, in which a youthful married couple moves from New York City to Bucharest, Romania. Julia (Maika Monroe) and Francis (Karl Glusman) seem to be very much in love and eager for a new chapter in their lives. Francis, who speaks Romanian, has been promoted to a marketing agency’s Romanian office. Julia, who we know was an “actress,” doesn’t speak a word. She is basically left alone to fend for herself in the couple’s apartment while Francis is off at work, making money and interacting with colleagues.

   What begins innocuously enough (or does it?) ends up as a waking nightmare. Julia, soon after moving into the decently outfitted apartment, sees what she thinks is a man staring at her from the building across the street. It doesn’t help her growing sense of isolation when she learns that there’s a serial killer – the media calls him “The Spider” – attacking young women in the neighborhood.

   Pretty soon, Julia is certain she is being stalked as prey. But no one believes her; at times, she almost doesn’t seem to believe herself. The movie skillfully plays with this ambiguity. What does it mean when someone who thinks they are being stalked begins to stalk their purported stalker? Is Julia being watched or is she the watcher?

   There’s very little actual violence in Watcher, but when it comes it comes brutally and most of all, loudly. Most of the time, what envelops the viewer is not blood and gore, but atmosphere. Dread, isolation, and madness are the name of the game here.

   The director makes the most of the on-location filming. Bucharest is as much a character in the film as Paris was in Frantic. The streets, museums, and the subway system all feature prominently in the visual narrative. Monroe’s acting is top notch, although it’s the subtly hidden interplay between her and the camera that makes her performance stand out. It’s well worth a look. One might even say it’s worth watching.

JONATHAN LATIMER – Headed for a Hearse. Bill Crame #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1935. Sun Dial Press, hardcover, 1937, as The Westland Case [photoplay edition]; Gregg Press, hardcover, 1980 [introduction by William L. DeAndrea]. Paperback reprints: Mercury Mystery #38, 1940s, abridged [digest-sized]; Century #136, 1950; Jonathan Press Mystery J-84, 1950s, abridged [digest-sized]; Dell #D196 [Dell Great Mystery Library #6], 1957, abridged; Macfadden, 1964; IPL, 1990. American Mystery Classics, softcover, 2022. <B>Filmed</B>as The Westland Case,  Universal, 1937, with  Preston Foster  as Bill Crane, Carol Hughes, Barbara Pepper, Frank Jenks as Doc Williams), Astrid Allwyn, George Meeker, Theodore von Eltz. Director: Christy Cabanne. Screenwriter: Robertson White.

   I’ve now read all five of the Bill Crane novels, albeit completely out of order. I’m pretty confident in saying that this one, Crane’s second outing, is clearly the best of them. It may even be the best medium boiled detective novel ever  — at least that I’ve encountered.

   It’s got everything and it’s tightly plotted in a manner I had no idea Latimer, at least in his Crane books, was capable of.

   It starts out with a Chicago death row inmate, Westland, scheduled to get the chair in six days for killing his wife.

   The murder victim was found in a locked room, her keys next to her, and Westland the only other one with keys. There’s no other plausible entrance than the locked door. She was shot with a service era Webley, a rare gun one of which is owned by Westland. But it’s been missing since the murder. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence. But the electricity in the chair doesn’t care.

   So Crane gets called in. And he tries really hard to keep it together thru the first half of the novel. But the fun really starts begin when his dipsomania kicks in. Drunk to the point of near incoherence on a combo of bourbon, absinthe and gin, three days prior to electrocution, he’s finally in fine form. He’s hilarious (‘she’s no mercenary — she belongs to a much older profession than that’), and booze is to Crane’s wiles what spinach is to Popeye’s biceps.

   Crane starts methodically, but even (and especially) in his drunken inspiration, he dances circles around the cops and criminals alike. He really is, as is his wont to bray, a ‘great detective’.

   He picks the lock to the locked room mystery, and in the nick of time.

   It nicked my time too, keeping me up til 3 am last night to see what happens. Which never happens. Like Crane, I need my sleep. And when I sacrifice my precious sleep to finish a book that’s got 100 pages left — lemme tell ya: the thing is good. It’s funny, it’s tough, and it’s a real honest to goodness mystery with a detective that actually detects — not just a bull in a china shop hoping serendipity strikes. But that too.

   So, like I said, the thing’s got everything. And it’s tight. It works. It’s really good. So there you go.

IN THE LINE OF FIRE. Columbia Pictures, 1993. Clint Eastwood, John Malkovich, Rene Russo, Dylan McDermott, Gary Cole, Fred Dalton Thompson, John Mahoney. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Currently streaming on Netflix and Hulu.

   As a thriller starring Clint Eastwood as a grizzled, aging Secret Service Agent obsessed with guarding the President from a dedicated assassin, In the Line of Fire was both a critical and commercial success. It’s not difficult to see why. First, there’s star power in Clint Eastwood, cast as the lead. Bitter, determined, and prone to acerbic quips, Frank Horrigan (Eastwood) is a late fifty-something who has the unfortunate distinction of being the only currently operative agent who was with John F. Kennedy on that fateful day in Dallas. Some thirty years later, Horrigan can’t seem to shake the feeling that, had he made different decisions, he might have been able to stop Lee Harvey Oswald.

   When Horrigan begins to investigate yet another potential threat to the president, he immediately finds himself embroiled in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with James Carney (John Malkovich). Portrayed with an intensity that matches – and often overwhelms Eastwood’s – Malkovich’s Carney is a skilled, but deeply paranoid antagonist.

   Malkovich, never one too phone in a performance, takes the role and imbues it with pathos. Carney – who likes to be called “Booth” – is a man who passionately believes that the country he once served has abandoned him. And he thinks he has found a kindred spirit in Horrigan. Little does he know that behind the gruff, sullied exterior, Horrigan is a true believer and dedicated patriot who, despite it all, still believes in his career choice.

   Horrigan’s personal life and code of honor is explored not so much by what he says – his rhetoric always seems to more aggressive than his heart – but how he conducts himself with others. That’s why his would-be romance with fellow agent Lilly Raines (Rene Russo) and his friendship with his younger partner Al D’Andrea (Dylan McDermott) are so key to the film. Neither is a distraction.

   Rounding out the cast are a coterie of actors who were quite familiar to contemporaneous audiences. John Mahoney, best known for his portrayal as the father on Frasier, is cast as the head of the Secret Service. Fred Dalton Thompson, politician as well as actor, portrays the president’s Chief of Staff. Look for Steve Hytner (Kenny Bania on Seinfeld) as Secret Service Agent Tony Carducci and a youthful Joshua Malina as Tony Chavez, another agent.

   Speaking of the 1990s, there’s a very early 1990s aesthetic to In the Line of Fire. The cinematography, the action sequences, and the somewhat sanitized interiors squarely places the film into the same time frame as JFK (1991) and The Fugitive (1993). Compared to 1970s cinema, early 1990s films are a bit flatter, less gritty, and more polished – even if the plot involves an unhinged assassin or conspiratorial villain.

   This past week was the second time I’ve watched In the Line of Fire. The first must have been around the time it was released. While it still holds up as a solid work of film making, I can’t say that it was necessarily as enjoyable this time around. A lot of the plot seems to repeat itself, with Horrigan and his colleagues constantly chasing false leads. And the prime piece of evidence that enables Horrigan to discover Carney’s alias – a scrap of paper with something written on it – seems a little too pat.

   Still, it’s an exceedingly watchable film with a strong cast. I just wish the director had leaned a bit more into Carney’s madness. But then again, had he done so, it would have been Malkovich’s film, not Eastwood’s. Maybe that could have worked even better?

TRANCE.  20th Century Fox, 2013. James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel.  Screenplay by John Hodge, Joe Ahearne (his story). Directed by Danny Boyle. Currently streaming on HBO Max.

   This twisty after the caper heist film somehow went under my radar when it came out in 2013, and that’s a shame because it has an excellent lead cast and a story with more twists than a bag full of Twizzlers.

   Simon (James McAvoy) is a curator at an auction house, and we discover fairly early in the narrative, the inside man in a heist masterminded by Franck (Vincent Cassel), thanks to his crippling gambling debts. During the heist Simon inexplicably attacks Franck and is struck by him knocking him unconscious.

   When Franck gets away with the McGuffin, Goya’s “The Ascension,” which just brought $26 million at auction, he finds the painting missing, and when he finally catches up with Simon after he gets out of the hospital, he claims amnesia from the head injury.

   Franck and his partners are less than happy.

   Suggested by a series of big art heists of the general era, this one goes in for a series of revelations related to Simon’s memory while stringing the viewer along with not only unreliable narrators, but unreliable narration and storytelling.

   No one is telling the truth in this movie, and yet again and again they are telling you exactly what you need to know to figure this out. In that sense Agatha Christie could not have laid out a better set of clues and red herrings, some of which I warn you are not the red herrings they seem.

   After torture fails, Franck and his team decide to try psychology and see if Simon’s traumatic memory loss can be retrieved by hypnosis. The therapist Simon chooses from a list of top therapists given him by Franck is Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) whose successful practice consists of mostly phobics, people wanting to lose weight, and chronic smokers.

   She trips almost immediately to the phony identity they have set up for Simon, and by the second visit has spotted he is wired so they can listen. At that point she meets with Franck and agrees to help recover Simon’s memory if she is in on the profit.

   Now as she plays a dangerous game between the infatuated and traumatized Simon and the attractive and suspicious Franck and the gang he may not be fully able to control, she must breakdown one roadblock Simon has put up after another, as the changing story of what happened to him between the head injury and losing the painting is dragged out, but not always as true as it might seem.

   Simon’s arc changes under McAvoy’s strong performance as we get subtle glimpses that neither things nor Simon are exactly what we think.

   I will warn, or tease, you there is significant full frontal nudity in this one, and also point out it is not at the least exploitative, but a vital clue and plot point that, like dozens like it planted and dropped along the way, absolutely pays off toward the end, as one revelation after another comes at the viewer without ever becoming parodic.

   Stylish, original, not derivative despite the Hitchcockian touches, with forays into Cornell Woolrich country as well as Patricia Highsmith in a world inhabited by near sociopaths, Trance keeps you on the edge of your seat and the edge of your conscience as you try to outguess, and largely fail despite some easy ones planted to let you think you are ahead of the game/ It is not only the screenwriters and director, but the characters who switch power roles from one scene to the next.

   You won’t watch this one casually while doing something else. If you want to keep up you will have to pay attention and even then you may have to go back to see if they really did play fair surprisingly often.

   In that sense it is at much a detective story as suspense, crime, or a caper, but one where you never quite trust the detective and shouldn’t.

   Granted there are a few of the inevitable plot holes where coincidence plays too large a role, particularly one they do make a halfhearted effort to pretend they covered, but generally from the opening to the final shot you have a perfectly good shot at outwitting this film, though I’m willing to wager you won’t, at least not as completely as you think you have.

   Danny Boyle, the golden boy of British film had some fun doing this far less consequential film but he knocks it out of the park with sharp performances, an ever twisting plot, and handsome visuals, none of which you dare to ignore.

   What is real and what has been planted, the nature of memory and the way it can be manipulated and lies to us, all those serious questions are posed, but in terms of one of the better outright old fashioned psychological thrillers of recent years.