PETER GUNN “The Kill.” NBC, 22 September 1958 (Season One, Episode One). Craig Stevens (Peter Gunn), Lola Albright (Edie Hart), Hope Emerson (Mother), Herschel Bernardi (Lieutenant Jacoby). Guest Cast: Gavin MacLeod, Jack Weston. Music by Henry Mancini. Written and directed by Blake Edwards.

   As opposed to my recent encounter with the first episode of Surfside 6, this is, wow, the way to start off a brand new private eye TV series. Introduce the characters: a tough but suave PI; his girl friend, singer in the night club where he spends a lot of his time; the tough lady owner of said night club; and the cop who’s actually a good friend of the aforementioned PI.

   Then explain who they are naturally, and show the relationships between them by seeing them in their usual haunts and as they interact with each other in the every day (or night) course of business.

   And have a story that’s wrapped up in 30 minutes (although certainly rushed a little at the end), and still have time for the PI and the girl take a break outside the club between sets talking about life, love and maybe, the future. All in the realm of totally cool, but when Mother is seriously injured in an explosion in the club, Mr. Peter Gunn (the PI) gets to show how tough he is too, and the thugs responsible for the explosion will back me up on that statement, you can count on that.

   Although several others of the same overall genre came before it, Peter Gunn the TV show was a breath of fresh air in the business, what with the noirish atmosphere throughout the show, and the music – by Henry Mancini – that took the genre to new heights. This is a TV show that all private eye aficionados can’t afford not to know about, nor miss. (Unfortunately if you don’t have it on DVD (all three seasons, two on NBC, one on ABC), right now the bad news is that you’ll have settle for watching it on FreeVee, with dreadfully awful commercials.)

WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS. 20th Century Fox, 1950. Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill, Bert Freed, Tom Tully, Karl Malden, Ruth Donnelly, Craig Stevens. Screenplay: Ben Hecht, based on the novel Night Cry by William L. Stuart.. Directed by Otto Preminger.

   A tough police detective, repeatedly in trouble for beating up suspects in cases he’s investigating, accidentally kills one of them, a guy being framed for knifing another guy after a dice game. After dumping the body, he finds someone else accused of the crime.

   That someone being the father of the girl he’s falling in love with, the estranged wife of the guy he killed. Whew. I hope I didn’t give too much away with all this plot summary. The fun in a movie like this is just to sit back and let events flow naturally.

SAMUEL R. DELANY – The Einstein Intersection. Ace F-427, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1967. Many reprint editions exist, but the Bantam paperback of April 1981 is the first US edition that includes a chapter missing from the Ace paperback original. Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

   In a new Earth, peopled with new inhabitants, Lo Lobey leaves his village and travels to find Friza, to return her to life. He meets various characters: Kid Death, Spider, Green-eye, and the Dove.

   Symbolic garbage, trailing off to meaninglessness. Some people might be impressed by this; not I. Read the back cover and forget the rest.

Rating: **½

[UPDATE.] The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula voting for 1968, and came in second for the Hugo award.

THE MIGHTY QUINN. MGM, 1989. Denzel Washington (Xavier Quinn), James Fox, Mimi Rogers, M. Emmet Walsh, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Esther Rolle, Robert Townsend (Maubee). Based on the book Finding Maubee by A. H. Z. Carr. The title of the film is derived from the song “Quinn the Eskimo” by Bob Dylan. Director: Carl Schenkel.

   I’d seen The Mighty Quinn before (reviewed here by my father a couple of years ago) and thoroughly enjoyed it. It must have been on DVD. This time, however, I decided to watch it on VHS on my 9” Sylvania TV/VCR combo.

   And while the small screen did inevitably detract from the very scenic aspect of the film, watching it as I did allowed me to appreciate the plot even more than during my first watch. Plot, or should I say, anti-plot? Because at the end of the day, The Mighty Quinn is, in many ways, a plotless movie.

   True, you have Denzel Washington portraying Xavier Quinn, a Carribean police chief, tasked with tracking down his childhood friend Maubee, who is now the prime suspect in a murder. But really, when you take the whole movie in, you come to realize that it’s a journey movie; not a plot one. That the movie’s force – and what makes it a personal favorite to a small group of people – is the myriad characters that Quinn meets along the way.

   In that sense, The Mighty Quinn is far more like 1950s noirs like Kiss Me Deadly (1955) than it is other Denzel Washington action/crime vehicles such as the ones he did with directors Tony Scott and Antoine Fuqua. Still, the movie isn’t noir. It’s not remotely hardboiled. If anything, it’s a little light and comedic at times. Which all works to its benefit.

LESTER DENT – Dead at the Take-Off. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1946. Bestseller Mystery, digest-sized paperback, date? Reprinted as High Stakes (Ace Double D-21, paperback, 1953).

   Lester Dent is best known as the creator of Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, who ranks with the Shadow as the most popular cull hero to come out of the pulp magazines of the 1930s. As “Kenneth Robeson,” Dent wrote close to 200 full-length Doc Savage novels for Doc’s own monthly magazine from 1933 to 1949.

   Dozens of these have been reprinted in paperback since 1964, under their original titles — Brand of the Werewolf, The Squeaking Goblins, The Living Fire Menace, etc. Despite hokey plots, stereotypical villains, and hurried writing, they contain some ingenious ideas and extrapolations. Dent was much more than a pulp hack; he had genuine talent and a convincing prose style that, when he took the time to polish it, matches up well with the best crime writers past and present.

   Dent’s best work is a pair of novelettes featuring detective Oscar Sail, which he wrote for Black Mask in the mid-Thirties, and Dead at the Take-Off, his first novel to appear under his own name. Take-Off is an evocative work, with postwar commercial aviation as its background.

   The protagonist is Chance Molloy, the owner of a small airline, AEA, who is facing financial ruin because a conspiracy headed by corrupt Senator Lord has prevented him from buying surplus military transport planes. Molloy, with the aid of two of his staff, has been trying lo obtain proof of the senator’s duplicity, and now believes he has found it.

   Lord’s nephew has agreed to turn over damning evidence against his uncle at the senator’s New Mexico ranch. Along with several other principal characters, including the senator’s daughter, Janet, Molloy boards Flight 14 for New Mexico. En route, there is considerable intrigue, capped off when the nephew turns up dead and Janet is drugged. Later, in New Mexico, an attempt is made on Molloy’s life, and the suspense continues to heighten. The violent climax takes place back on board the airliner.

   There is plenty of action, but Dead at the Take-Off has much more than that to recommend it. The characterization is sharp, with strong psychological overtones; effective use of flashback is made; and the writing is among Dent’s best. The book is jam-packed with such imagery as:

   The book has its flaws — Dent was never able to totally overcome his. pulp origins and there is a good deal of melodrama here — but it is still a very good example of the mid-Forties hard-boiled crime novel.

   Dent’s other books are somewhat less successful, although Lady to Kill (1946), which also features Chance Molloy, and the paperback original Cry at Dusk (1952) have many of the same positive qualities as Dead at the Take-Off .

———
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.

CORNELL WOOLRICH – Hotel Room. Random House, hardcover, 1958. No paperback edition.

   The novel’s protagonist is Room 923 of the St. Anselm Hotel in New York City.

   A nice, fresh, new and sparking hotel, the room was christened June 20, 1896, by newlyweds.

   Crossing the threshold, the bride tells the groom, on the inevitability of aging, ‘I can’t imagine it ever happening to me. But when it does, it won’t be me any more. It’ll be somebody else….. An old lady looking out of my eyes…  A stranger inside of me. She won’t know me, and I won’t know her.’

   â€˜Then I’ll be a stranger too,’ responds the groom. ‘Two strangers, in a marriage that was begun by two somebody-elses.’ He closed the door. But for a minute or two his face seemed to glow there where it had been. Then it slowly wore thin, and the light it had made went away. Like the illusion of love itself does.

   Down the bride’s face, “a thin shining line down each cheek like silver threads unraveling from her eyes. ‘Don’t let the day come. Don’t let it come yet. Wait till he’s back first’… mercilessly the night thinned away, as if there were a giant unseen blackboard eraser at work, rubbing it out. ‘But now tomorrow’s yesterday…. Oh, what happened to tomorrow? Who took it away?’

   Next we are catapulted in time to the day Wilson declares war against Germany, April 6th, 1917. A young enlisted man comes, seeking a room on his last night. Everything’s booked. But an elderly German couple are in 923. Screw the krauts, screw the Kaiser, says the desk-man. And kicks them out. It’s the patriotic thing to do. Everyone “broke out in a rash of patriotism, like hives.”

   The young enlisted man calls a pretty girl he knows just vaguely and needles her into a date. He pressures her into giving herself to him. It’s the patriotic thing to do. And she does. Fervently. Oh what passion. What patriotic passion. And they immediately afterwards run out and wed. Promising not to speak to each other again until the war is over. And that day meeting again. At Room 923.

   Now it is Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. And the clandestine couple meets again. And they don’t recognize each other. The patriotic passion is spent. They don’t really care for each other at all. And they agree to an annulment. To let it go.

   And now it’s February 17, 1924. The last night in the life of a Mafioso who has lost his grip. Who has lost his hold on his territory. He’s done but doesn’t know it.

   His mother comes to see him. “’D’you remember when I was a kid, and you used to make lasagne for Vito and me, and bring ’em hot to the table—?”

    ‘Quella non ero io . . .That was not I, that was another woman, long gone now. A woman whose prayers were not answered. Io non sono piu tua madre . . .’ she whispered smolderingly. ‘Mother, no. Just a woman who bore a devil. The woman who once bore you says good-bye to you.’

   And then there was death, the great know-nothing part of life. Or had life perhaps been only the brief knowsomething part of an endless all-encompassing death?”

   The next time we come to Room 923, it is the evening of the stock market crash, October 24, 1929. And the man checking in, a powerful Wall Street man. At least he was so that morning. And now he’s squat.

   The hotel’s become second rate, with time. “’[N]ever been in a hotel like this before…. Oh, not for a long time, anyway, And that was another me… My life slipped out of its room and beat its bill, and there are no tracers anywhere that can find it and bring it back.’

   The bellboy performed all the little flourishes, turning the light behind it on, then off again, shed a spark for an instant, and then remain out as it had been before.

   He looks at a photo of his daughter, inscribed: “’To Daddy from his loving Ruth’. And there was something so polite….. greetings from a distance, from a thousand heartbeats away, from which all the warmth has escaped en route, they had so far to go.”

   Opening the window to jump out, “Like an extra dimension, that had been lurking about him all the while, but whose existence he had never suspected until just now….. glass behind which all life is supposed to be lived, to be allowed to run its course, unknowing — he knew now — of the strangeness on the other side. The glass that, without that, shatters easily enough”.

   Next is the night before Pearl Harbor, December 6, 1941. A mixed couple, a Caucasian girl and a Japanese boy, have run away together to NYC—to escape the anti-miscegenation racism of their parents. To start on their own. To elope. And begin their lives……

   And last, we are left on September 30, 1957. The evening before the demolition. The hotel to be razed for an office tower.

   The blushing bride we met back in 1896 has come back. To bookend her life, and the life of the room.

   She thanks her departed husband “for not slowly aging before my eyes, as I would have slowly aged before yours, until finally neither of us was what the other had married, but somebody else entirely. Some unknown old man. Some unknown old woman. Thank you for staying young. And for letting me stay young along with you. A lifetime of youth. Eternal spring.”

’[H]otel rooms,’ amended the maid, ‘are a lot like people.’”

   I liked it. A bit wistful and sad, with dominant sense of geography and loss. It’s an interesting idea for a novel: having the location as the main character, letting the setting stay still, slowly aging, and having the times and people change, in accelerated action at momentous times. It would make a good play.

   I’ve often felt the strange gap where you visit a familiar place, a house you grew up in, or a town, a restaurant, great memories, so intensely real, but gone and gone forever. And the place remains, seemingly unscathed.

   But is it? Is the place unscathed? Or are all of the memories and events somehow contained therein? Redeemable in time?

   I don’t have any of the answers. And neither does the novel. But there are evocations and suggestions of meaning. Which is the only honest response anyway.

   Woolrich dedicated the novel to his dear mother, his roommate until the end:

         To Claire Attalie Woolrich

            1874-1957

         In Memoriam

            This Book: Our Book

   Woolrich also wrote at least a couple of other stories taking place at the St. Anselm Hotel. One of the stories, “The Penny-A-Worder,” also takes place in room 923, and is about a pulp mystery writer assigned a rush order to write a cover story to match a cover that has already been produced — set to go to the printers tomorrow morning. This story was intended to be included in Hotel Room — but the publishers decided that it didn’t fit in with the rest of the stories.

   “Mystery in Room 913,” written twenty years earlier, occurs right down the hall. It’s a pretty typical, but well-told story about a mysterious ‘suicide room’. Every single man who checks in seems compelled to throw himself thru the window. The cops buy it. Why complicate things? It’s the depression! But the hotel dick doesn’t believe it at all. And he uses himself as bait!

               —–

   Barry Malzberg , Woolrich’s last agent, set me onto Hotel Room with his recommendation of ‘The Penny-A-Worder’. But I’d suggest to readers to save that story until after reading Hotel Room. It has just the right dream within a dream quality that gives the rest of the book its intended phantasmic effect. And it should have, to my mind, have been included as an epilogue to the book.

   Malzberg, in a reminiscence contained in The Big Book of Noir, edited by Ed Gorman, Lee Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, recalls complimenting Woolrich on Phantom Lady. Woolrich’s response was that the man who wrote that novel has been dead for years.

   It’s an interesting take on life. That the person that you are and the person that you were are strangers to one another. It’s a dissociation shared by all of the characters in Hotel Room. You could retitle the title: ‘In Memoriam to Identity’ (to steal from Kathy Acker), or, to coin a phrase: ‘The Dissociation Association’. But perhaps Hotel Room is right. It’s anonymous. And it fits you. At affordable rates. It may even be a vacant now. Make your reservation. Room 923 awaits.

   Just as Holmes had his Moriarty, and the 87th Precinct had its Deaf Man, so Nero Wolfe had… Arnold Zeck, who figured in three consecutive Rex Stout novels: And Be a Villain (1948), The Second Confession (1949), and In the Best Families (1950). Beginning with Full House (1955), Viking Press — his publisher for the last three decades of his life, and my future employer — assembled three books apiece into eight omnibus editions, five of which contained two novels and one of his collections (themselves generally comprising three novellas, occasionally two or four). All but one had poker-themed titles, the books seemingly selected at random, but the last bore the delicious moniker Triple Zeck (1974).

   A little history: my high-school geometry teacher, whom I will forbear to name, did not excel at her job, but I owe her an incalculable debt, for it was she who — knowing I loved mysteries — lent me her Triple Zeck (I now have my own copy). So entranced was I with Wolfe and Archie that I proceeded to devour all 46 books, plus the spin-off Red Threads (1939), that year. Mind you, in 1981, I was also amidst other series: Lord Peter Wimsey (7 books), Tarzan (4), Barsoom (1), George Smiley (4), Horatio Hornblower (1), Mike Hammer (the only one not to stick; 1), and Len Deighton’s anonymous spy (1); hard to believe that at 18, I had so much time for reading …  while falling in love with my wife!

   Backtracking a bit, the trilogy follows Too Many Women (1947), in which a disharmonic convergence of two virtually unthinkable events occurs the night the second victim, Kerr Naylor, is killed. First, Naylor loses Saul when he abruptly ducks into a taxi, and second, after Naylor takes it to Wolfe’s brownstone and, without leaving a name, asks for Archie, who is out for the evening, Fritz forgets to tell Archie upon his return.

   â€œThat Saul Panzer is the best tailer in New York. I don’t for a minute believe he lost Naylor! He don’t lose ’em! Even if he did, when Naylor came here, wouldn’t you have had him tailed when he left, since you were interested in him?,” bellows the understandably incredulous Cramer.

   The curtain goes up on And Be a Villain (Hamlet, Act I, Scene V) as Wolfe — goaded into action by IRS payments — suggests that radio star Madeline Fraser hire him to investigate the poisoning of horse-race tipster Cyril Orchard on her show, in a sponsor’s product, yet.

   Lina would pay only expenses, plus a deductible $20,000 if he nails the killer, to stop the bad publicity, although Tully Strong, secretary of the Sponsors’ Council, says the makers of Hi-Spot, the doctored beverage, might wish to do the hiring. It is decided that said fee will be split unequally among Hi-Spot; the network, the Federal Broadcasting Co. (FBC); Fraser; and other sponsors White Birch Soap and Sweeties: cue assembling the suspects.

   Refusing to work for Sweeties, Wolfe reassigns their 2% to the FBC and hosts Lina; her “stooge and feeder,” Bill Meadows, and manager, Deborah Koppel; script writer Elinor Vance; Nathan Traub, ad exec for the agency handling three sponsors; and Strong. Gate-crashing are Hi-Spot’s president and p.r. man, respectively Walter B. Anderson and Fred Owen, and FBC veep Beech.

   Absent are Columbia mathematician F.O. Savarese, the ill-fated broadcast’s surviving guest, otherwise engaged, and Nancylee Shepherd, the “nosy little chatterbox” and “pain in the neck” who organized the country’s largest Fraser Girls’ Club, kept at arm’s length as much as possible, while being tolerated by Lina to a degree.

   All deny remembering who’d uncapped the bottles, one containing cyanide — with which Fraser’s husband, Debby’s brother, allegedly killed himself six years earlier — and placed it in front of Orchard; it is unclear if he was a deliberate target. With Nan and her mother shipped off to the Ambassador in Atlantic City, impervious to Saul’s charms, Wolfe grills Savarese, an expert on probability who knew Orchard, and asked to join him on the show, to no end. Archie’s faked telegram from Al Shepherd lures his family to the brownstone, where Wolfe catches Nan lying, forcing her to admit that nearly a year ago, clear glasses were switched to opaque blue … and Lina’s bottles were always marked with Scotch tape.

   The inference is clear: Lina hasn’t been drinking Hi-Top, which gave her indigestion, a ruinous fact if revealed, and Bill says that Traub — naturally unaware of the substitution — unwittingly gave Orchard Lina’s poisoned coffee. Wolfe tells Cramer enough to have his army of men investigate who might have it in for Lina, and if his fact is deemed essential to catching the killer, he will collect that fee.

   Even this seems fruitless until Beula Poole is shot dead in her office; she and Orchard published, for the unheard-of weekly price of $10, sheets giving, respectively, “inside advance information on political and economic affairs” and race-track tips, and Cramer reveals that both their offices were cleaned out.

   Then, it happens: answering Wolfe’s ad seeking subscribers to What to Expect or Track Almanac is a voice “hard, slow, precise, and cold as last week’s corpse”; he has heard it before, with advice on a job for General Carpenter, and to advise him to limit his “efforts in behalf of a Mrs. Tremont,” which he did, but only “because no extension of them was required to finish the job I was hired for.”

   Zeck, who has a place in Westchester, is not pleased to learn that Wolfe knows his name — ascertained by Del Bascom’s agency with no word to Archie, whom he did not want to involve — and warns him to drop the matter. Cautioning Archie to forget his name and stay away from him, Wolfe drops a bombshell.

   â€œI’ll tell you this. If ever, in the course of my business, I find that I am committed against him and must destroy him, I shall leave this house, find a place where I can work — and sleep and eat if there is time for it — and stay there until I have finished. I don’t want to do that, and therefore I hope I’ll never have to.”

   Then it’s back to the matter at hand, and he learns that said sheets were an ingenious blackmail racket. A disobedient Archie calls Lon Cohen at the Gazette — introduced in The Silent Speaker (1946) — to ask about Zeck, whom Lon has heard “owns twenty Assemblymen and six district leaders … if you print something about him that he resents your body is washed ashore at Montauk Point…”

   Comparing notes with Cramer, Wolfe posits that the éminence grise behind the sheets has “units” nationwide, ensuring success both with modest payments and by rigidly adhering to one-year “subscriptions” sans renewals. He suggests focusing on subscriber Vance — whose namesake is “Eleanor” in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) — and says one of Zeck’s cutouts may know the murderer’s identity.

      He refuses a unilateral attempted firing by Anderson, who is enraged at associations with blackmail after Archie gives Lon the story (naming no names, natch) and withdraws his sponsorship; Wolfe also stirs the pot by faking an “anonymous” letter that implicates Elinor in a suspicious death.

   At least that’s the plan, but as Archie waits for the interested parties to wind up a summit meeting to select the replacement for Hi-Top, Debby eats a sample of Meltettes candy, to disprove Nan’s assertion that “It’s dangerous!,” and promptly drops dead.

   Unfortunately, when Archie refuses to be frisked like the others, Deputy Commissioner O’Hara (invoked yet unseen in Too Many Women) has him hauled downtown, where the forgery is found. He is sprung to forestall the release of an announcement sent to Fraser’s station, WPIT, that Wolfe “has solved the murder cases, all three of them, with no assistance from the police,” and can soon tell the D.A., so Cramer and Stebbins start rounding up suspects…

   The blackmailers cleverly implied knowledge of fabricated dirty laundry but, by the law of averages, inevitably put the bite on someone who really had a deadly secret they would kill to protect. Lina faked Lawrence’s suicide and made herself seem to be the target, not Orchard; Anderson was scared off by Strong, who showed her the accusatory letters and deduced her guilt.

   When Zeck calls to “congratulate you on keeping your investigation within the limits I prescribed,” and Wolfe responds, “I permit prescription of limits only by the requirements of the job. If that job had taken me across your path you would have found me there,” he says, “Then that is either my good fortune — or yours,” and hangs up.

   Act II, The Second Confession, opens as James U. Sperling, chairman of the board of the Continental Mines Corp., tries to hire Wolfe to do what Bascom has not: prove there is, and if possible get, evidence that layer Louis Rony is a Communist. He wants to prevent Rony, a “champion of the weak and downtrodden,” from marrying his younger daughter, Gwenn; Wolfe and Archie agree with her that communism is “intellectually contemptible and morally unsound.”

   Wolfe says, “Why not hire me to reach your objective, no matter how — of course within the bounds permitted to civilized man?,” but Del’s reports reveal that Rony was seen at Bischoff’s Pet Shop, “a branch of Zeck’s far-flung shenanigans…”

   â€œAndrew” Goodwin infiltrates to photograph Stony Acres, Sperling’s country home near Chappaqua, for a corporation portfolio and steal shots of Rony, at whom Connie Emerson is making a pass, while Archie fears that war widow Madeline may do so at him, tangling a possible diversionary run at sis Gwenn.

   Also present are James, Jr., economist Webster Kane, and Connie’s husband, Continental-sponsored WPIT newscaster Paul, despised by Wolfe as a veritable fascist. Fiercely protective of Gwenn, Madeline recognizes “Andy” from a news photo and intuits that his object is Rony; offering him a ride back to the city, Archie plots for him to be knocked out in an ambush, simulated by Ruth Brady and Saul.

   Rony carries an American Communist Party membership card for a “William Reynolds,” which Archie photographs, and eight keys, of which he takes impressions, giving Saul his cash to maintain the fiction. On his return, Wolfe is reporting a warning from Zeck to let Rony alone when the plant rooms are blasted with gunfire, leaving Theodore traumatized but unhurt.

   Enlisting Andy Krasicki, Lewis Hewitt, and G.M. Hoag to salvage what they can, Wolfe is driven — literally and figuratively — to Westchester, where he enlightens the Sperlings regarding “X,” leaving Gwenn to decide if she insists on proof regarding Rony, whatever the cost; stalling for time, she makes a rendezvous to tell Rony they’re through.

   The victim of an apparent hit and run, he’s found behind a bush by Archie, and Wolfe has Sperling, who rehires him to solve it, report the death, bringing local law Dykes, Noonan, and Archer — introduced, like Andy, in “Door to Death” (1949).

   Archie deflects Archer’s interested in the faux holdup as best he can, while the antagonistic Noonan is thrilled that Wolfe’s car is found to have killed Rony, which Kane confesses he did by accident while borrowing it to mail some letters in Mount Kisco. Archer is satisfied, but not Wolfe, who refuses to consider Sperling’s $50,000 pay-off (including orchid-damage) final and, back home, receives the same amount in an anonymous package, obviously on behalf of Zeck.

   He calls wishing luck to Wolfe, who asks Doc Vollmer to seek any sign on Rony of being knocked out before he was run over, with inconclusive results. He sends Archie and Saul with duplicate keys to his apartment, fruitlessly searched just when Jimmy and his mother turn up, looking ostensibly for letters from Gwenn, but presumably for a threat Rony held over them.

   Telling the ’teers that any information will be used — or not used — at his sole discretion, he asks Saul and Orrie Cather to learn the hold, and Fred Durkin to probe their servants in an effort to glean who doped a drink meant for Rony yet consumed by Archie, who had done the very same thing, and switched them in the hope of searching his room.

   Connie suspiciously materializes just as Archie locates a stone that — per Weinbach of the Fisher Laboratories, introduced in “Cordially Invited to Meet Death” (1942) — hit a man’s head. Saul learns that Jimmy contributed to the Committee of Progressive Business Men, a “funny front” for former Vice President, 1948 Progressive Party candidate, and alleged Communist “fellow traveler” Henry A. Wallace, his check one of several photostatted by a possible spy.

   Wolfe is visited by Gwenn, who reports hearing an argument between the Emersons that implicated the jealous Paul, and “Mr. Jones,” a mysterious contact within the Communist party whom Archie has never met, and then has Archie call off the boys.

   Deducing that Reynolds is not Rony’s alias but the killer’s, Wolfe ghost-writes articles on the party’s inner workings (leaked by Jones) for Lon, now second in command at the city desk; his anonymous letter fingering Reynolds as their source leads high-ranking Harvey and Stevens — one of whom may be Jones — to sign a document identifying his photo.

   At the climactic confab, Wolfe forces Web to retract his first confession, only to reveal he is Reynolds, his stunned look the titular admission. In what Archie calls “the tail,” Sperling repays Wolfe by pulling Paul off the air, where he’d insulted Wolfe, and a satisfied Zeck sends him $15,000, replacing what he’d paid Jones, all set aside by Wolfe as a war chest.

   Wolfe finally makes good on his vow in Act III, In the Best Families, which begins when wealthy Sarah Rackham visits with cousin Calvin Leeds and hires him to learn the source of second husband Barry’s new income. As cover, Archie is to be called in on a valuable dog’s poisoning at Calvin’s Hillside Kennels, and invited with him to dine at her adjacent Westchester estate, Birchvale.

   That morning, Wolfe is expecting a sausage delivery from Bill Darst that he and Fritz plan to share with Marko Vukcic, but the box instead contains a cylinder of tear gas, a warning from Zeck to lay off Barry, suggesting an answer to Mrs. Rackham’s question; Wolfe hangs up when Zeck offers to replace her $10,000 with cash.

   â€œThis episode will be repeated. [The telephone] will ring, and that confounded voice will presume to dictate to us. If we obey the dictate we will be maintaining this office and our means of livelihood only by his sufferance. If we defy it we shall be constantly in a state of trepidant vigilance, and one or both us us will probably get killed.”

   Wolfe refuses to ignore the third threat, as does Archie, who advises that the household begin the “trepidant vigilance” and heads off to Westchester, casing Eastcrest, Zeck’s mansion. At dinner are Sarah’s widowed daughter-in-law, Annabel Frey; banker, Dana Hammond, her admirer; and secretary, Lina Darrow, as well as her admirer, state assemblyman Oliver A. Pierce.

   That night, Nobby, a Doberman pinscher given to Sarah by Calvin, crawls to Hillside and dies with a steak knife stuck in him; his mother, Hebe, gets the scent, leading Calvin and Archie toward Birchvale, but on the path is Sarah, stabbed with the same knife. Archie is candid with Archer, if omitting Zeck, and Leeds says, “It happens in the best of families” before he races home, where Wolfe has bolted, leaving three notes. Two offer Theodore and Fritz employment with Hewitt (who takes the plants) and Marko, respectively, while one reads, “A.G.: Do not look for me. My very best regards and wishes,” and a Gazette ad announces his retirement, referring only clients having “unfinished matters” to Archie.

   Marko reveals that Wolfe has given him a power of attorney, told him “to offer the house and its contents for sale [with] confidential instructions,” and bidden Archie “to act in the light of experience as guided by intelligence.” New millionaire Barry contradicts Archie, claiming that Sarah was going to consult Wolfe about possible mishandling by Hammond of her affairs, and disbelieving Archie’s ignorance of Wolfe’s whereabouts, Archer locks him up.

   Before Wolfe’s lawyer, Nathaniel Parker (mentioned, by surname, in The Silent Speaker), springs him, Archie is offered a job in the “organization” by his cellmate, Max Christy, who per Lon sets up “little weekend roundups … Anything men risk money for.”

   Bequests also go to distant relatives, servants, Lina ($200,000), Annabel (Birchvale plus $1 million), and Leeds ($500,000), whose corroboration of Archie is disbelieved as well; like him and everyone else, Cramer thinks Archie knows how to reach Wolfe but, having deduced the truth, he says Wolfe should return Sarah’s fee and Zeck “is out of his reach.”

   Archie decides to open his own office at 1019 Madison Avenue, with Annabel as his first client, who asks him to a gathering of the suspects … none of whom will cooperate. Max invites Archie to meet a man he thinks might be Zeck, but it is bearded Pete Roeder from L.A., who wants Archie to tail Barry and has his driver, Bill, take them up to 1019 to talk.

   There, he is revealed as Wolfe, who’d spent “the most painful month of my life — except one, long ago,” in Texas, and has lost 117 pounds. Like Charles Forbin in D.F. Jones’s Colossus (1966), he knows his only guarantee of privacy is to feign the need for female companionship, so Lily Rowan hosts a five-hour confab in her E. 63rd Street penthouse, necking with “Pete” en route to sell it.

   Having planted a seed of suspicion in Zeck, Pete has Archie hire the ’teers for the job, deliberately letting themselves be spotted, and when confronted by Barry, Archie accepts $6,000 to reveal that they are working — indirectly — for Zeck, whom he conjectures “is getting set to frame you for the murder of your wife.”

   Archie claims to have told Barry he was working for Annabel in his daily reports to Max, who takes him to an audience where Zeck denies seeking Wolfe, but tries to recruit him; with the threat of a murder rap, he wants to force Barry to help them duplicate Roeder’s successful L.A. operation locally.

   Summoned to Archer’s office, Archie encounters Lina (a name Stout, typically casual, used for two characters in the trilogy), jilted by Barry and peddling the tale of a fictitious whistle-blowing call from Wolfe to Sarah that gave him a motive. “About all that [his] ticket to the electric chair needed was my endorsement,” yet however deserved, it would end the anti-Zeck scheme, so he shoots the story full of holes.

   Persuaded that his only out is an accommodation, Barry is taken to Zeck by Archie — now nominally on the payroll — and Pete, with a gun beneath his briefcase’s false bottom, used to cover Barry when they abruptly bind and gag Zeck. He agrees to trade evidence Wolfe has assembled against him for evidence that will convict Barry, who grabs the gun Archie “carelessly” put down to free Zeck, kills him, and in turn is killed by henchmen.

   Back in the brownstone at last, Wolfe earns Sarah’s fee by revealing that Calvin tipped off Zeck, and only he would be trusted by Nobby enough to stab him after killing his new mistress; vacationing with Lily in Norway, Archie learns that Leeds has hanged himself in his cell.

   The only book in the trilogy to be adapted, “In the Best Families” (3/6/81) was directed for the William Conrad series — which, oddly enough, I was not watching while reading the books during its original January 16-June 2 run — by the prolific George McCowan and, like “Before I Die” (1/30/81), scripted by Alfred Hayes.

   I hope you’ll agree that to summarize the first two in detail gave the third an essential context! Guest stars Linden Chiles (Leeds), Burr DeBenning (Max), and Diana Douglas (Sarah) each made multiple appearances with Conrad on Cannon; DeBenning, the ill-fated scientist in The Incredible Melting Man (1977), was also later seen on Matt Houston opposite Lee Horsley (Archie).

   Even before Sarah and Leeds arrive, a messenger (Chuck Tamburro) delivers the fateful package from Arnold Dorso (Robert Loggia), “king of the spiders,” who knows Wolfe is out to change his untouchability. Defying this third warning, Wolf takes the job; Hayes excises several characters, but otherwise follows Stout closely with the Westchester trip, the introduction of Annabel (Juanin Clay) and Barry (Lawrence Casey), and the murder.

   Once again, Archie returns home to find the door wide open as Fritz (George Voskovec) and Theodore (Robert Coote) wait with the notes, yet no sooner has he been summoned to Rusterman’s than Marko (Alex Rodine) takes him to Wolfe, hiding in the meat locker.

   The spectacle of a chipper Wolfe in chef’s garb, singing opera, is a far cry from the folds of skin bespeaking “Pete’s” crash diet, and if he truly sought to disappear, hiding out with his oldest friend seems less than secure. It’s as if Hayes said, “Let’s adapt Gone with the Wind, but leave out all that nonsense about the Civil War”; why, with 46 to choose from, select and then vitiate the book whose distinguishing characteristic is Wolfe’s imposture?

   Archie rejects an offer from Annabel, who believes Barry is guilty, but accepts one from Max (now a Christy/Roeder amalgam), ostensibly bitter over his abandonment by Wolfe, whose dispute with Marko’s chef over seasoning is interpolated as supposed comic relief.

   The rest of the plot, and even the dialogue, remain faithful, with Archie flying solo in the climactic confrontation, and Annabel assuming some of Lina’s functions, just as Max did Pete’s. When the normally unsentimental Wolfe hands Leeds over to D.A. Emory (Arnie Moore) and his assistant (David M. Zellitti), his outrage over Nobby’s betrayal is true to Stout; in a lame tag, Archie refuses a delivery from another messenger (Bennett Roberts). Loggia’s toymaker in Big (1988) was a change of pace from crime stories, e.g., Scarface (1983), Prizzi’s Honor, Jagged Edge (both 1985)  — earning Loggia an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor — Innocent Blood (1992), Lost Highway (1997), The Sopranos.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: “Disguise for Murder”
   

Editions cited:

   Too Many Women: Bantam (1955)

   And Be a Villain, The Second Confession, In the Best Families in Triple Zeck: Viking (1974)
   

Online source:

SILVER BULLET. Paramount Pictures, 1985. Gary Busey, Everett McGill, Corey Haim, Megan Follows, Terry O’Quinn, Lawrence Tierney, Bill Smitrovich. Narrator: Tovah Feldshuh. Screenplay by by Stephen King, based on his novel. Directed by Dan Attias.

   This is a quintessentially Stephen King movie. What do I mean by that, exactly? Well, for starters, the official title of the movie is Stephen King’s Silver Bullet. Or so that’s what it says on the VHS box cover. Also, the screenplay is by King, adapted from his novelette, “Cycle of the Werewolf” (1983). The movie is well-entrenched in the horror genre, set in a small town where evil lurks just under the surface, and where kids can be insightful, cruel, and far wiser than adults. Sounds like King to me.

   The plot. Evil comes to Tarkers Mills, a small town with the usual coterie of King characters. Here the darkness comes in the form of a judgmental local religious leader, Reverend Lowe (Everett McGill) who – it just so happens – also is a werewolf.

   Ultimately, it’s up to wheelchair bound teenager Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim) to both discover Lowe’s dark secret and to convince his skeptical Uncle Red (Gary Busey) that the local minister is a lycanthrope. There’s also a subplot about Marty’s strained relationship with his older sister Jane, who is weary of having to play second fiddle to her paralyzed younger brother.

   Look for Lawrence Tierney as a bar owner who joins a vigilante mob that tries to hunt down the serial killer responsible for a number of local gruesome slayings. (Hint: it wasn’t a serial killer). Tierney has an oversized presence in any movie that he’s in, so much so that even though he probably doesn’t have more than forty or fifty words of dialogue, he’s very much a primary character.

   Watching on VHS was an experience. It gave the movie that subdued analog feel that seems fitting for a 1980’s King movie. This wasn’t the first time I watched Silver Bullet. I remember watching it when I must have been eleven or twelve. It must have been on HBO. And I was absolutely terrified. Well, I can say I was less scared this time. Time and age has a way of doing that to people. But it’s still a hair-raising experience. Pun intended.

   Silver Bullet isn’t really a good movie, per se. But it’s a highly nostalgic one. Both in terms of my own childhood memories and in terms of its content.

SURFSIDE 6. “Country Gentleman.” ABC / Warner Brothers. 03 October 1960 (Season One, Episode One). Lee Patterson (Dave Thorne), Troy Donahue (Sandy Winfield II), Van Williams (Ken Madison), Diane McBain, Margarita Sierra. Guest Cast: Ray Danton, Frank DeKova, Robert Burton, Janet Lake. Director: Irving J. Moore. Many shows available for streaming on the Internet Archive.

   As far as least a secondary function of the first show of the season is o introduce the characters, this particular one is (was) a gigantic flop. It might be me, but I felt as though I could have been watching an episode in the middle of the season rather than the first one.

   Not that that was much of a problem. The picture filled itself in easily enough, if all you want is to watch is a show with three good-looking guys running a PI agency in Florida (Miami) with the usual light-hearted effort to put on an otherwise ordinary PI TV show.

   But to put in the effort that a blogger who likes to watch old PI TV shows should be doing, let me crib from IMDb:

   â€œKen, Dave, and Sandy are three hip private detectives living on, and working out of, a houseboat in Miami, Florida. A yacht, belonging to socialite Daphne [Diane McBain], is anchored next to their houseboat. While not pursuing criminals, they spend time at the Fontainebleau Hotel chasing Cha Cha [Margarita Sierra], who works as an entertainer in the Boom Boom Room.”

   It is interesting to note that Van Williams’ character (Ken) was a fellow who previously was one the lead players on Bourbon Street Beat, another Warner Brothers/ABC production which had just closed down for good the previous spring.

   In this one, a cool suave but still somewhat crude gangster (played by totally cool suave but still somewhat crude Ray Danton) is trying to use his money and charisma to join whatever high society that Miami has to offer, and hitting a brick wall in doing so. When one of the gents who blackballed him is found dead, guess who is the obvious suspect? Not to mention that he and the Commodore’s daughter have become very close.

   This is a somewhat mediocre episode and yet perhaps as enjoyable a one as viewers were able to see in 1960. The stories may very well have improved, as the series was on for two years. But when the “villain” of the piece has more screen appeal than its nominal three stars, something’s just not right.
   

AUSTIN REED – The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict. Random House, hardcover, 2016. Modern Library, softcover, 2017. Edited by Caleb Smith. David W. Blight (Foreword), Robert B. Stepto (Foreword).

   â€˜Cut off from all virtue a man will in time,

   Sit brooding on vice and preparing for crime.’

   Written in 1858, but privately held for 150 years until discovered at a Rochester estate sale in 2009, this is apparently the first prison memoir by a Black American.

   It is the picaresque bildungsroman (don’t I sound smart) of a man first imprisoned at aged nine at the House of Refuge in the Bowery in 1833 (for burning down the house of a farmer that horsewhipped him for stealing fruit and refusing to work off his debt), his multiple escapes and further crimes, and his placement at Auburn State Prison in 1840.

   By ‘picaresque’ what I mean is this: I went to a screening of the Italian movie Il Sorpasso. It’s a road movie about a drunken womanizing hooligan who convinces an uptight law student to forsake his exams for an intoxicated spree across the countryside. It inspired Alexander Payne to make Sideways. Payne was at the screening and said that the ‘road movie’ is just a picaresque novel in film form. And he claimed the picaresque novel is at least as old as Don Quixote.

   And that what’s fun and easy about the picaresque novel/road movie (at least from a creative standpoint) is that all you have to do is tell a series of chapters going from points a to b to c on a map. Each stop on the map is a different chapter. And that’s it.

   So while ‘picaresque’ sounds all hoity toity, all I mean to say is that this book is just a series of events in the life of a juvenile delinquent. A real-life Huckleberry Finn with horrific periods of imprisonment for his shenanigans.

   Each time he is caught and imprisoned: “awaiting my arrival… was Mr. Hard Heart, Mr. No Feelings. Mr. Cruel Heart, Mr. Demon, Mr. Fiend, Mr. Love Torture, Mr. Tyrant, and Mr. Cat Bearer” (‘cats’ being the cat gutted barbs slashed upon a prisoner’s back).

   And by ‘bildungsroman’ all I mean is that the book shows how the dastardly, bastardly treatment of a juvenile delinquent turns a mischievous boy into a hardened criminal. “Horrors, horrors, horrors, eternal horror of horrors came beating and pealting upon my mind.”

   I can’t say the book was that fun to read. It was okay. The goal, I guess, of the book was to convince other juvenile delinquents to stick to the straight and narrow — scaring ’em straight from a life of crime.

   The best thing about the book is how surprisingly modern the language is. I had read something somewhere from Raymond Williams, I think (what a great scholar I turned out to be!), saying that the hardboiled/proletarian novel emerged from the prison confessionals of the 19th century. And I guess I can see it to some extent. There is definitely a rough-hewn unvarnished quality to the prose. And it’s the heavy varnish and embroidery that I find so annoying about most literature prior to Hammett, Hemingway and Tully. Get to the freaking point! (My wife has an Onion T-Shirt that reads: “Let the Fucking Begin”).

   So, yeah. I’ve been reading 19th century slave narratives and prison confessionals on Raymond Williams’s recommendation. And so far I guess I agree. Not that I’ve gotten a great deal of joy from these reading experiences so far (although the Confessions of Nat Turner was surprisingly wacko — that dude was a total, astounding wack-job).

   But yeah. I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that plain-talking, hard-boiled prose was happening in America much earlier than we’ve been led to believe. It’s generally criminous and confessional. And it may not be the most enjoyable thing in the world to read. But it’s there. It’s real. It’s hard as rocks and it’ll make your head bleed.

   Just take it from Rochester’s own Austin ‘Rob’ Reed. Stay free of crime, me lads, lest the blade’s scabbard broach its breach: “Show him to me, and ere the sun sets in the west the bowknife of my father shall be stained with his blood.” I beseech ye: don’t let it be so! Stay free of crime, me lads. Let the Lord’s path be your guide, lest your soul swelter in hell, yelping helplessly, forevermore.