NEIL ALBERT – Appointment in May.  Dave Garrett #5, hardcover, Walker, 1996.  No paperback edition.

   Well, I see Albert has moved back down Publisher’s Row to his point of origin (see list below), another PI writer having a rough time of it. In all honesty, I wasn’t impressed that much with his first two, and quit the third without finishing it, and didn’t try the fourth. Pickings are slim right now, though, so once more into the breach. Or maybe breech.

   Dave Garrett is hired to follow a woman who has left her husband, to find out why. He does, and does, but the husband wants him to keep shadowing her for reasons that are unclear. The money’s solid though, so he does again. But then someone dies, and he wishes he hadn’t.

   The problem with Albert’s books is that I haven’t believed any of them. Many times in each I’ve found myself stopping to think, “Would this person really do this?” or “Could it really happen this way?”

   Some of ’em are big things and some of ’em are small, and sometimes the answer’s “maybe” and sometimes it’s “hell, no.” The point is, there are always lots of them, and they occur time after time, book after book. Albert and I just seem to have very different ideas about how people are and how they act, and about what’s credible and what’s not. I won’t read another of these.

      The Dave Garrett series—

The January Corpse. Walker 1991.
The February Trouble. Walker 1992.
Burning March. Dutton 1994.
Cruel April. Dutton 1995.
Appointment in May. Walker 1996.
Tangled June. Walker 1997.

STEPHEN MARLOWE – Francesca. Chester Drum #15. Gold Medal k1285, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1963.

   If my count is correct, there were in all twenty cases for Washington DC-based PI Chester Drum, but somewhere along the way, through his many contacts in the higher levels of government, he became more and more involved in overseas adventures. Francesca, the novel, is one of these, taking place in Switzerland and France and the skiing areas up in the mountains of each.

   Offered employment by a Geneva-based and wealthy consultant to international criminals – nice work, if you can get it – Drum at first turns him down, but of course you noticed my use of the phrase “at first,” and soon enough, yes, he is up to his neck in danger and adventure once again. The man who hires him is named Axel Spade – and I’ll wager you caught that as soon as I did. His problem is that his daughter’s fiancé has absconded with three million dollars of his, and he wants it back.

   He also would like his daughter back, too, and safely, but apparently she has disappeared with him, willingly.

   The daughter is not the Francesca of the book’s title. Francesca is the beautiful movie star who is engaged to Mr. Axel Spade, and of course sparks are created as soon as she and Drum meet. There is also another villain involved, a man as ugly as sin, and as evil. Thus ends the list of major characters, a list not including the usual assortment of policemen, monks (with guns), and innocent bystanders.

   Enough to make a short book, only 144 pages, go by very quickly and pleasantly, however. The Drum books were always a lot of fun to read when I bought them new from the supermarket spinner rack on my way home from school, and so was this one today. I probably didn’t notice back then how smooth and confident Marlowe writing was, describing as he did people and places and adventures I could only dream of meeting and visiting and having.

   And I still haven’t. But one can still dream, can’t one?

A. BERTRAM CHANDLER – The Road to the Rim. Ace Double H-29, paperback original, 1967 (**). Cover art by Jerome Podwil. Previously serialized in If Science Fiction, April-May, 1967. Collected in To the Galactic Rim (Baen, trade paperback, 2011; mass market paperback, 2012).

   Chronologically, the first “Rim Worlds” story, or at least the first featuring John Grimes. Here he is Ensign Grimes of the Space Survey Service, newly commissioned and incredibly naive. While on passage to his assigned base, he joins a merchant ship captain on an illegal mission of revenge.

   The purser, Jane Pentecost, likely influences his decision, but piracy, after all, cannot be condoned. Afterward, the captain and Jane must leave for the Rim, but Grimes is partially exonerated by their success in destroying the attackers. Since it had already been written, we know there is more to come.

   Not a complete novel as far as development is concerned. An episode, though an important one, in the life of Grimes. Characterization is flat and unreal, changing too much, too abruptly. Grimes worries about his motivations but lets the action and events carry him on.

Rating: **½

NOTE: The version serialized in If SF is identical except for the partial deletion of a scene with Jane in a detention cell.

(**) The novel on the reverse side of the Ace Double paperback, The Lost Millennium, by Walt and Leigh Richmond will be reviewed here soon.

CHARLES HIGSON – On His Majesty’s Secret Service. James Bond. Ian Fleming Publications for the National Literacy Trust, hardcover, 2023.

   After James Bond (Daniel Craig) gathered Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham, boarded a helicopter, and sky dived into the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, you just had to know this was coming.

   It is May 4th, 2023, with two days before the Coronation of Charles III as King of England, and James Bond is handed a job. 009 is dead, 009 who had won Miss Moneypenny’s heart, and though he despised the man, it is 007’s job to do something about it, and that something is as M explains: “We both know what the Double O Prefix means. Don’t make me spell it out, James. There’s a mad dog that needs to be quietly put down and buried before it bites too many people.”

   The “mad dog” is Æthelston of Wessex, who believes himself the uncrowned King of England, a descendant of Alfred the Great, and mad, Æthelston has plans to do something about it. A terrorist he has retreated to Hungary and Szalkai Castle, know locally as ÖrdÅ‘g Széke, the Devil’s seat where the Hungarian government protects him from extradition or rendition and he is up to no good.

   Bond’s job is simple, eliminate him as he eliminated 009 sent to Hungary to check on him.

   Nothing is ever that easy.

   Because there is also the beautiful and deadly Ragenheiõur Ragnarsdótter, of Iceland, a “slightly elfin woman” he sees as a “shape shifting Viking sea serpent.” She is involved with Æthelston, but how? Ragenheiõur is a delight. And Æthelston a superb Bond villain.

And then Bond, in enemy hands discovers a threat to Charles. On Coronation Day at 8:48 am the balloon goes up. But which balloon? And how? And can Bond in the enemies grasp in a castle in Hungary solve the mystery and reach England in time to prevent it?

   Charles Higson has been writing the Young James Bond books (he dropped the series recently) and got the nod for this job more or less at the last minute. The National Literacy Trust saw a way to raise funds for one of the soon to be crowned Charles III charities, and what could raise more money than 007 already tied to the late Queen by his nationality and the famous Olympic Opening stunt.

   Of course you couldn’t write a book where he jumps out of a plane with Charles, but the idea was there.

   Around 50,000 words and a mere 156 pages long the book comes in hardcover in an attractive royal blue laminated cover, and for Bond lovers (myself) and completists, it’s a worthwhile effort. It moves quickly, is often witty, sometimes funny, and suspenseful. I was not a fan of the first couple of Young Bond books by Higson, but he quickly got the idea.

   He may lack Fleming’s turn of phrase and literary pretensions, not a good thing in my opinion, but he does a fine job in this adventure that finds Bond confronting his conscience in ways that mirror his first outing in Casino Royale in 1953, and makes a dash for a suspenseful down to the wire ending at the Coronation at 8:48 am.

   This isn’t a great Bond novel. It’s not unlike the Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle wrote for Queen Victoria’s doll house library, really only longer, but it is entertaining, a swift enjoyable read, and a must for James Bond fans.

   I’m not sure it is available here yet, but I can’t imagine it will only be available from Ian Fleming Publications for long or only in the UK.

   And for once the heroine gets the last line.

   I know Charles won’t, but Bond has already reigned almost as long as Elizabeth.

DOROTHY BAKER – Young Man with a Horn.  Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1938.  Reprinted many times. Basis for the 1950 film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.

   Fictionalized biography of jazz trumpet player Bix Beiderbecke (named Rick Martin in the novel).

   Rick Martin was an orphan who spent his teens and the teens of the 20th century at a black jazz club in Los Angeles.

   There he learned the two styles of jazz: “Memphis style and New Orleans style. The difference between the two is something like the difference between the two styles of chow mein: in one you get the noodles and the sauce served separately, and in the other sauce and noodles are mixed before they are served.”

   He snuck into a church to practice on their piano and “pecked at those keys like a chicken going for corn….making music was on him like a leech……You don’t learn it, you make it…..his eyes were as hard and bright as copper in the sun.”

   He got really good at the horn. A player just starting out has to fit in with the rest of the players. “There are various ways of showing off, and one of them is not to show off.” But “when that thin blond boy stood up in his place and tore off sixteen bars in his own free style, filling in the blank that was allotted to him on the score, it was surprise forever, like seeing an airplane take off from the deck of a good solid ship. To hell, please, with the law of gravity.”

   â€œAt one they quit for the night, and he was always just hitting his stride, so he went somewhere else. He lived his life after hours. After his good work was done he did better work.”

   And then he met a girl. “She looked like an English girl about to go out for a day’s shooting, but she was American, and I don’t think it was very clear to her then what she was out to do……The earth was turning well off center, so that time was forever and not made of minutes. The real world (the street lights, the flask, Rick’s trumpet case) was as vague as the sound of tires whirling through water beneath them, but even then it seemed that the mind could slice like a knife through all the knots of syntax to make anything…..You can’t know anything unless you’ve got the kind of hands that can feel it, unless you’ve got the kind of eyes that never see the outside of anything, just cut straight down under…..He’d never known a really complicated woman, the kind who knows how to strip the nerves and kick the will around, the kind whose voice can say anything. he couldn’t let himself look at her; the sight of her twisted him…..She was born cagey. And yet she signed the marriage license legibly and with a steady hand, and when, under oath, she said ‘I do,’ almost anyone would have thought she did. They were crazy about each other, and crazy.”

   He kept playing and drinking and sleeping as little as possible so he could stay up all night playing the clubs. It “burns a man to tear music out of himself for a long time; it dries him out, leaves salt in his mouth, dust in his throat.”

   He hears a note in his mind that he tries to hit on a record. But he missed it and ruined the record. The first time he’d ever failed. “I don’t know what the hell that boy thinks a trumpet will do. That note he was going for, that thing he was trying for — there isn’t any such thing. Not on a horn.”

   After that, he quit his band. “He stayed in the joints with his own kind, the incurables, the boys who felt the itch to discover something…..[booze] gave him a way out, a means of pushing out beyond the actual, banal here-and-now, …stretched tight to play the way he wanted to.“

   And he pushed his frail body til his “eyes flicked…They…burned like lighted rum.”

   And he burnt himself out.

   But maybe it’s not a tragedy. “The good thing, finally, is to lead a devoted life, even if it swings around and strikes you in the face.”

         ——

   The writing is impressionistic, vague, syncopated and smudged. There’s no judgment. Just a life of a jazz trumpet player. Neither comic nor tragic. It just is. Like a jazz trumpet. If there’s tragedy, it’s the tragedy of Icarus, wings melted by the sun. I’m with Baker on this one: “To hell, please, with the law of gravity.”

   I liked it. But I would’ve liked it more had I not just started reading Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues — which reads like mainlined Bix Beiderbecke to the brain. Young Man with a Horn is more Seurat, dotting the landscape with seemingly abstract colors from up close, forming images into view from a distance. It’s subtle and tasty. But it ain’t Bix. It ain’t dangerous. It won’t explode in your hands and die on the vine. Which is fine. They can’t all do that.

   Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe collection Curtains for Three (1951) contains the now-standard three novellas published in The American Magazine: “The Gun with Wings” (December 1949), “Bullet for One” (July 1948), and “Disguise for Murder” (as “The Twisted Scarf,” September 1950).

   â€œThe Gun with Wings” was not near the body of opera singer Alberto Mion — or so say his wife, Peggy, and would-be successor, Fred Weppler, who didn’t tell the police it only appeared later beside the supposed suicide. They want Wolfe to dispel the shadow of murder over their intended union; Archie has “occasionally let Lily Rowan share her pair of opera seats with me” so he recognizes a suspect, baritone Gifford James.

   Continuing the ballistics theme, the “Bullet for One” knocks industrial designer Sigmund Keyes out of his saddle in Central Park; five of the suspects collectively hire Wolfe, some of them hoping he’ll nail the sixth, yet before long, all but one of the sextet is arrested for one reason or another.

   In “Disguise for Murder,” the brownstone hosts “no such throng as that within [Archie’s] memory”: at the suggestion of Bill McNab, garden editor of the Gazette, Wolfe has invited the Manhattan Flower Club to see his orchids. Fritz and Saul are manning the door while Archie — who regrets having agreed to help mingle — is taking a breather in the office, where he is joined by a panicked young woman, Cynthia Brown.

   Con artists Cynthia and her “brother,” Col. Percy Brown, were brought by Mimi Orwin, their prospective mark, a wealthy widow hooked in Florida and accompanied by her son, Eugene. Cynthia was terrified when upstairs she recognized, and was recognized by, the unidentified man she’d seen entering Doris Hatten’s apartment, whom she believed was “keeping” her friend there — and strangled her with her own scarf immediately afterward, a crime that has baffled Cramer for five months.

   Promising to bring Wolfe down to hear her out, Archie returns to the plant rooms to keep a special eye on the men, including one who grabs a flower pot in an oddly menacing way, revealed as an actor, Malcolm Vedder.

   The crowd has thinned to a trickle when the wife of Homer N. Carlisle, executive VP of the North American Foods Co., peeks into the office for a look at Wolfe’s famous three-foot-wide globe and finds Cynthia, strangled with, per Doc Vollmer, something like…a scarf.

   Cramer grills the remaining visitors, held there by Fritz and Saul, but both he and Wolfe decline psychiatrist Nicholson Morley’s offer to question all men among the 219 guests, dutifully recorded by Saul, and try to identify the killer. In a spiteful, ill-advised move, Cramer insists on sealing the office as a crime scene; otherwise “Wolfe might have called his attention to a certain fact as soon as [he] saw it himself,” saving a lot of trouble.

   Gleaned from Archie’s report but overlooked by him and Cramer, that fact leads Wolfe to a dangerous test of his theory: he sends a blackmail note to one suspect, who calls with an unfamiliar voice to make an appointment with Archie via an elaborate runaround and two cut-outs. Tied to a chair by those he dubs W-J (wrestler-jockey, for his mismatched torso and legs) and Skinny, he is at the mercy of the killer, at first unrecognizable.

   But bribery turns the flunkies, and “he” is revealed as the cross-dressing wife of Doris’s sugar daddy, Carlisle; in the plant rooms, the men had all doffed their hats, yet Cynthia recognized the killer specifically because of the hat, assuming it to be a man, as she had at the apartment.

   A first-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Disguise for Murder” (6/17/01) was one of four collaborations between director John L’Ecuyer and writer Sharon Elizabeth Doyle. As with the following consecutive pair, “Door to Death” (6/4/01) and “Christmas Party” (7/1/01), this and “Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe” (6/3/01), while based on widely spaced novellas, were linked by Doyle with original material for international broadcast and DVD as the respective faux telefilms Wolfe Goes Out and Wolfe Stays In. Here, her connective tissue is the often-invoked Thursday-night poker game played by Lon (Saul Rubinek), Orrie (Trent McMullen), Saul (Conrad Dunn), and Archie (Timothy Hutton).

   When Archie relates a postscript to “Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe,” Fritz (Colin Fox) asks them to quit early to prepare for the onslaught, during which Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) and Archie struggle to keep smiling. The body of Doris (Tramara Burford) is seen briefly in flashback, and after Archie encounters Percy (Nicholas Campbell), Mimi (Nancy Beatty), Eugene (Phillip [sic] Craig), and Vedder (Beau Starr), that of Cynthia (Kathryn Zenna) is found by Mrs. Carlisle (Debra Monk). Repertory player Ken Kramer makes a second and final appearance as Vollmer — later played by Joe Flaherty in “The Silent Speaker” (7/14 & 21/02) — summoned as Homer (Aron Tager) blusters at the indignity of being detained.

   As usual, the regulars are superb, e.g, Fritz bringing down Percy as he attempts to leave; Wolfe bellowing, “The police shall receive no sandwiches!”; Saul coolly standing by his legendary memory; Cramer’s (Bill Smitrovich) glee as he has Lt. Rowcliff (an uncredited Bill MacDonald) seal Wolfe’s office.

   The interrogations are intercut into a montage à la “Over My Dead Body” (7/8 & 15/01). A burgundy jacket and long hair visualize the odd persona of Morley (Richard Waugh), while the need for viewers to see and hear what had been simply described on the page causes the phone call to telegraph the killer’s gender a little more clearly before Skinny (Boyd Banks) and W.J. (James Tolkan) confront Archie.

         — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Murder by the Book

Edition cited —

      Curtains for Three: Bantam (1970)

Online source —

GEORGE V. HIGGINS – Sandra Nichols Found Dead. Jerry Kennedy #4. Henry Holt, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1997.

   I had quit reading Higgins some time ago, prior to receiving this one. It seemed the books were all dialogue — his trademark, of course — and it didn’t enthrall me enough to wade through it trying to piece together a story. Talk, talk, talk, bore, bore, bore. This one looked like it might have a plot, so I thought I’d give old George another try.

   Well-known criminal attorney Jerry Kennedy is in an uncomfortable position. He’s forced into handling a civil case by a judge who’s supposed to be his friend, and not only that, but acting as a prosecutor. A woman has been found dead, murdered, and though there isn’t enough evidence for the DA to indict anyone, there may be enough for the woman’s children to file a Wrongful Death suit, and reap huge financial gains therefrom. Kennedy’s not too keen on the whole thing, but he really doesn’t have a lot of choice.

   I don’t want to use the space or the time to expound on why it’s so, but the fact is that the only rational reason to read Higgins is that you love to hear his characters talk. There’s always some story (and maybe a little more here than usual), but never enough to carry a book.  He made his reputation with dialog, monologues, and speech patterns, and that’s basically that’s all there is.

   Every new character is introduced with three or four pages of monologue from someone, and that’s Higgins’ form of characterization, and that’s Higgins’ way of telling a story. It’ s obviously good enough for a lot of people; me, I get irritated at best and at worst and more often, bored.

   This was a case of “at best,” and I just got occasionally irritated. I really don’t think he’s that much better at authentic speech patterns and realistic dialog than a number of others, either. *Grump.*

NANCY RUTLEDGE – The Preying Mantis. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1947.

   Curt Trevor gets a strange call from his younger cousin in New York, then [gets] word the next day Doug had been killed in a traffic accident. Arriving for the funeral is a surprise: Doug’s widow. They had been married [only] the day before his death, and she is blind.

   Doug’s fiancee also finds the woman quite a surprise. Not the least of the surprises in this story is how violent – not to say vicious – it turns out to be, with the control of the United States at stake. [The story] has the sense not to tie up all of the loose ends, too.

[Bibliographic Update.] Nancy Rutledge (1901-1976) wrote ten mysteries from 1944-1960 under her own name, and one as by Leigh Bryson in 1947, with Preying Mantis as her third.

THE MAN WHO WOULDN’T DIE. 20th Century Fox, 1942. Lloyd Nolan (Mike Shayne), Marjorie Weaver, Helene Reynolds, Henry Wilcoxon, Richard Derr, Paul Harvey, Billy Bevan, Olin Howlin, Jeff Corey, Charles Irwin (as The Great Merlini; uncredited). Based on the character created by Brett Halliday and the novel No Coffin for the Corpse by Clayton Rawson. Director: Herbert I. Leeds. Currently streaming on YouTube here.

   This was the fifth of seven Michael Shayne movies starring Lloyd Nolan that were produced by Fox between 1940 and 1942, and to tell you the truth, right up front, this isn’t one of he better ones. To start with, to me, while he was a very fine actor, Lloyd Nolan is about 180 degrees the reverse of what Brett Halliday’s Miami- and New Orleans-based PI Michael Shayne should look and sound like.

   That’s a handicap for all seven films to overcome, right from the start. But playing it to the extreme for comedy effect, as they do in this one is, to my mind, all but sacrilegious.

   On the other hand, though, there are others in these early Nolan films which not bad. (Sleepers West is one I can easily recommend, but it is difficult to make a bad movie that takes place on a train.)

   There is no train in this one, only a silly plot about a man (supposedly) coming back to life after being accidentally killed in an old manor house (one of those), then surreptitiously buried at the dead of night in a shallow grave.

   Shayne is hired by the daughter of the man who owns the house after she is awakened at night by an intruder and a shot is fired at her. To explain his presence she introduces him as her newly obtained husband.

   That the real husband shows up later, to much confusion and hilarity, needs not be mentioned.

   Meanwhile the local cop, the kind of country lunkhead who seems to always show up in movies such as this, is obviously in way over his head, giving Mike Shayne all the room he needs to solve the case, which he explains in the end in great detail. When asked how he found out all the facts be brings up, he says, well, like a good magician, a good detective never reveals his secrets. Pfui!

   A movie only for fans of comedy films, not hard-boiled detective movies. (And look, I didn’t even bring up the secret laboratory in the basement, much less the villain whose eyes seem to glow in the dark.)